THE BRITISH SEAS 




The Baiters. From a picture by Colin Hunter, A.R.A. 



THE 



BRITISH SEAS 



PICTURESQUE NOTES 
W^CLARK RUSSELL 



AND OTHER WRITERS 



With many Illuftrations after 

J. C. HOOK, R.A., H. MOORE, R.A., COLIN HVN7ER, A.R.A. 

HAMILTON MACALLUM, and other ARTISTS 



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acmTllI^^IOM^ 

66, Fifth Avenue 
1894 



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tfRANSF&B, 
S, O. PUBLIC LIBfcAHY 
SJBFT, 10, 1940 



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CONTENTS. 



Chapter page 

I. The Downs. By W. Clark Russell . . . i 

Historic Interest — North Foreland and Mar- 
gate — Goodwin Sands — A Summer Scene — A 
Wreck on the Sands — Ramsgate Lifeboat — 
Hardships suffered by Lifeboat-men— Wreck 
of the Indian Chief— Ramsgate Harbour — 
Ramsgate viewed at Night. 

II. The Downs {continued). By W. Clark Russell . 28 

The 'Longshoreman — Historic Associations — 
Shipping in the Downs — The Galley-Punt— 
Deal Boatmen — Smuggling — Broadstairs and 
Charles Dickens— Sandwich. 

III. Down Channel. By W. Clark Russell . . 49 

Thames below Bridge — The Docks — Historic 
Interests — Gravesencl— -Speed of Steamers — 
Passenger ships formerly— Dover and Folke- 
stone — Lydd — Romney — Hastings — East- 
bourne — Brighton. 

IV. Down Channel {continued). By W. Clark 

Russell 73 

Isle of Wight — Cowes — Shipping in the Solent 
— Bournemouth — Weymouth and Bridport — 
Torquay — Plymouth and its Sound and scenery 
— Falmouth from Pendennis Castle — Penzance 
— Mount's Bay — Newlyn — Cardiff, its Docks 
and Streets. 



viii Contents. 

Chapter pagf . 

V. The Wight and the Solent Sea. By Charles 

Cagney 101 

VI. St. George's Channel. By P. G. Hamerton . 130 

VII. The West Coast of Scotland. By A. J. Church. 160 

VIII. The Northern Shores. By James Purves . 182 

Sutherlandshire — CapeWrath — Pentland Firth 
— Orkney and Shetland Isles— Noss Head- 
Wick— Herring Fishing — Cromartyand Moray 
Firths— East Coast from Peterhead to East 
Neuk of Fife. 

IX. The Firth of Forth. By James Purves . .209 

Great Thoroughfare— The Fife Coast— The 
Haddington Coast— Bait Gatherers — Oyster- 
dredging Song — Fishermen's Love for Sea — 
Tragedies — Berwickshire Coast — Northumber- 
land Coast. 

X. The North Sea. By W. Clark Russell . . 238 

The Port of Newcastle — The River Tyne — 
View from the High Level Bridge — Story of 
the Tyne — Types of Tyne-built Ships — The 
old Collier — The Tyne in Mid-winter — Arm- 
strong, Mitchell & Co. — Robert Stephenson & 
Co. — Ordnance and Locomotives — Tynemouth 
and Cullercoats — The Story of the Lifeboat — 
Henry Taylor and the Lightship — Grace 
Darling — Collingwood's Crew at Trafalgar — 
Sunderland : Its Narrowness, its Industries — 
Seaham Harbour and Lord Byron — The 
Hartlepools — A pretty Winter Picture — The 
well-deck Steamer — Middlesborough and the 
Tees — The Story of the Tees — Mr. John 
Vaughan and the Cleveland Hills. 

XI. The North Sea {continued). By W. Clark 

Russell 264 

Whitby — Joshua Coxon, Poet — Walter Besant 
on Whitby— The Whaler's Yarn— In the North 
Sea in a Smack — A Gale of Wind — An old 
Danish Frigate — Scarborough — Steamboat 
Excursions —The Thames. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



The Baiters. By Colin Hunter, A.R.A. . 

The Goodwin Sands on a Calm Day. By Barlow Moore 

The Ramsgate Lifeboat. By W. H. Overend 

The Shipwreck. By J. M. W. Turner 

Ramsgate. By Barlow Moore . 

Shipping in the Downs. By Barlow Moore 

On a Quay. From a sketch by David Cox 

Old Ships in the Medway. From a drawing by E. W 
Cooke. R.A 

Fishing Boats. From a picture by J. M. W. Turne 

Dover. By H. T. Dawson .... 

Hay Barges off the Reculvers. From a drawing by T. S 

Robins 

Hastings. By J. J. Chalon .... 

In Portsmouth Harbour. By J R. Wells 

Waves. By Henry Moore, R.A. 

Off Looe Island. By Henry Moore, R.A. 

A Visitor for Jack. By Hamilton Macallum . 

Ironclads off the Lizard Lights. By J. R. Wells 

The Armed Knight Rock, Land's End. By A. Ditchfield 



PAGE 

Frontispiece 



j 
9 

15 

21 

37 
43 

5i 
55 
59 

63 
69 
75 
79 . 
8r 

83 
87 
90 



List of Illustrations. 



ku;e 



Lynton. By W. J. Miiller 93 

The Mumbles, Swansea Bay. By J. S. Cotman . . 97 

In Southampton Water. From a drawing by Barlow 

Moore 103 

Breaking Waves. By Henry Moore, R A. . . . 107 
Cowes. From a drawing by Barlow Moore . . .111 
The Old Blockhouse Fort, Cowes. From a drawing by 

De Wint 115 

A Yacht Race. By Barlow Moore 119 

Off the Needles. From a drawing by Barlow Moore . 127 
Dublin Steamer leaving Holyhead. From a drawing bv 

J.R.Wells '. 133 

Caernarvon Castle. By Alfred Dawson .... 143 
The Road under Penmaenmawr. From a drawing by 

David Cox . . 147 

Flint Castle. From a drawing by T. Girtin . . .151 

Off the Mersey : Atlantic Steamer picking up a Pilot. 

From a drawing by J. R. Wells 155 

Loch Fyne. From a drawing by J. Pennell . . . 163 

The Morning Breeze. Island of Kerrera, Mull Hills in 
the Distance. From a picture by Colin Hunter, 
A.R.A 169 

Duntulm Castle, Isle of Skye. From a drawing by J. 

Pennell 173 

Loch at Tarbert, Harris. From a drawing by J. Pennell. 177 

Cape Wrath. Drawn by Alfred Dawson . . . .185 

Shaking the Nets. From an etching by Colin Hunter. 

A.R.A 191 

Noss Head, near Wick. Drawn by Alfred Dawson . .197 

Herring Boats. Drawn by Alfred Dawson . . .201 

Village near Frazerburgh. Drawn by J. Pennell . . 215 



List of Illustrations. xi 

PAGE 

Home Again. From a picture by J. C. Hook, R.A. . .219 
Tantallon Castle and the Bass Rock. Drawn by Alfred 

Dawson j 

An East Coast Foreground. Drawn by J. Pennell . . 231 
The Mouth of the Tyne. From a drawing by Barlow 

Moore 2i " 

Sunderland Harbour. From a drawing by G. Chambers 253 
Boats in the Surf. From a sketch by Henry Moore, 

R.A 265 

Yarmouth. By J. M. W. Turner 268 

On the East Coast. From a sketch by Henry Moore, 

R.A 2 ?i 

Lobster Pots. From a drawing by E. W. Cooke. R.A. . 275 




THE BRITISH SEAS 



CHAPTER I 

THE DOWNS. 

Historic interest — North Foreland and Margate — Goodwin 
Sands — A Summer Scene — A Wreck on the Sands — 
Ramsgate lifeboat— Hardships suffered by lifeboat men — 
Wreck of the Indian Chief— Ramsgate Harbour— Ramsgate 
viewed at night. 

There is not a tract of water the wide world over 
fuller of memories, more charged with historic mari- 
time interests, than that little space of Channel sea 
which washes the fragment of Kentish seaboard, 
from the foot of the giant sentinel — the South 
Foreland — to the fast-dissolving relic of Sandown 
Castle at the north end of the quaint, salt, seething, 
blowing, and desperately cold old town of Deal. 
There is, indeed, no particular grandeur of scenery 

B 



2 The British Seas. 

hereabouts. The romance, the colour, the warmth, 
the delicate lights and shades of such havens as 
Plymouth — that Sydney Bay in little — of Falmouth, 
of Dartmouth, of some scores of spots round these 
coasts, are wanting. There is little or no shading of 
vegetation. The stare of the cliff is hard and bald 
with chalk ; the line of land falls sharply from the 
foreland altitude to the flat and dismal wastes of 
Sandwich, with their one or two storks moping soli- 
tarily, and nursing their melancholy on one leg. 
There is a deal of mud in Sandwich Haven at ebb 
tide, with something of ghostliness in the vision of a 
little tug staggering on rickety paddle-wheels through 
the slime-defined channel of the River Stour. A 
church spire, peeping over distant trees at the ex- 
tremity of the stretch of soil-like sand, hints at 
civilization amidst these wastes. It is Sandwich — 
quite a miniature Nineveh in its way ; a fact as far 
as bricks and mortar go, yet as complete an abstrac- 
tion, too, as though it had been buried five hundred 
years since. 

As the land trends towards Ramsgate it grows 
from marshes and sand-plains into a chalk front, and 
by the time it has brought its shoulder to bear upon 
Pegwell Bay — famous for those shrimps which, by 
the way, are never caught there — it has raised itself 
to the dignity of a cliff, and so proceeds, till past the 
North Foreland and Margate, when it shelves again 
into the bleak and insignificant seaboard of West- 
gate. But though there is very little of beauty, and 
nothing whatever of majesty, along this line of 



The Dozvns. 5 

coast, saving the imperial height of South Foreland, 
that certainly presents a kingly front as it raises its 
towering head and shining eye of lantern, like to 
some great giant keeping a bright look-out on that 
coast of France yonder, and sentinelling these 
kingdoms in their south-eastern parts ; — yet a sort 
of rude picturesqueness, qualities of a briny and 
tarry quaintness there are in abundance, beyond 
anything of a like sort that I am acquainted with 
in other parts of the country : thanks largely 
to Deal, which is so pre-eminently a surf-created 
town that the beholder, having once surveyed it, 
must not expect ever to see anything like it again. 
But it is not only Deal ; right abreast, facing the 
line of shingle that blackens and flashes under the 
creaming arch of the breaker, is the long yellow 
shoal of the Goodwin Sands. Here is a detail of 
prodigious significance in the interests of this tract of 
waters. A beauty it has, but of a very deadly sort. 
On a calm day the gold-coloured line of it stretches 
along the horizon somewhat sinuously, as though it 
were some sleeping, floating serpent, measuring a 
league or so from its venomous fang to its poisonous 
tail. The smooth summer ripple purrs upon its 
sleek coat, and a soft sound, like the seething of 
champagne, floats it off into the warm silence of 
the day or night. The red lightships, resembling 
a little company of soldiers, guard it. They rear 
their masts like muskets, and deliver their cries of 
" Halt ! " in the language of small ordnance or of 
sparkling lanterns. It is a spot where the con- 



6 The British Seas. 

templative thinker would love to sit and muse ; 
but he must take care to look very earnestly at 
the barometer before he embarks for the shoal ; he 
must observe the tides also, and should he be alone, 
then, after he lands, he will be wise to keep a taut 
hold of his boat's painter whilst he sits down and 
thinks. 

I was once ashore on the Goodwins on a calm, 
moonlight night ; not alone — no ! but my boatman 
was a man of few words ; he was a trustworthy 
person, and there was no grog in the boat, and it 
was without anxiety that I strolled a little way 
inland and sat me down on a black rib of a dead 
wreck, and pondered and moralized whilst I took 
a survey of my situation, and considered the spectral 
beauties which shone out ice-clear, yet of a silvery 
mistiness too, round about me and in the clear dusk 
of the north and west. The moon rode high in the 
south, a small ball of greenish splendour, with a fan- 
shaped wake of molten silver trembling under her ; 
and there was nothing to tarnish her disc saving 
now and again a thin ring of gossamer scud float- 
ing slowly athwart, like a little burst of steam, 
and gathering tints of mother-of-pearl as it blew 
stealthily, with airy sheen, off the rim of the orb. 
The silence — how is it to be expressed ? It was the 
deeper for the delicate, innumerable voice of rippling 
waters. The white foreland cliffs showed wan in 
the spangled obscurity of the distance — mere clouds 
or heaps of faintness, as though they were self-lumi- 
nous, with a look of ice in places. The haze of the 



The Downs. 7 

lamps of Deal hung low upon the water in a dim, 
golden hovering ; and the lights of Ramsgate showed 
like a showering of fire-flies. A mile or so away was 
the Gull lightship, with her one lantern slowly re- 
volving and striking a spark of fire into the moonlit 
atmosphere, in the likeness of a radiant spoke of a 
wheel, as it turned with pendulum regularity. The 
stars never looked higher, I thought, than they did 
on that night ; but I was low-seated, and the plain 
of the Channel sea stretched flat on either hand of 
me, tremorless as ebony, with a flake of light in the 
north-eastern heart of it dropped by some large 
star that shone like a rose low in the velvet 
depths. 

Here one might dream until the cold black line of 
the crawling tide warned one to be off. Even a 
sluggish imagination may successfully transform a 
fairy scene of moonlit sea into the magnificence and 
horror of the thunder of the hurricane and the raging 
of foam crimsoned by the lightning dart, when 
inspired by such a bone of wreck as that which I sat 
upon. A short line of like ribs marked all that 
remained of the amidship section of a vessel of 
considerable burthen. She had stranded on the 
Goodwins some three or four weeks before in such 
another warm night as this ; but it was dark and 
thick, with a near horizon, and there was a mere 
oozing of moon, shapeless as a jelly-fish, up in the 
smother that the orb faintly whitened. The vessel 
had touched and hung with all sail set — courses and 
topsails rising into royals — as bland and elegant a 



8 The British Seas. 

fabric in her way as any that ever floated through 
the Gulls. They burnt a flare on board her, a ruby 
light that made a blood-red picture of the motionless 
craft ; whilst the instant her situation had been 
noticed, up swept a rocket from yonder Gull light- 
ship, a ball of flame that might have been caught by 
the hand that discharged it, so motionless was the 
atmosphere and so plumb the descent of the meteor- 
signal. A minute later an air of wind came in a low 
moan along the sands. It freshened, and yet fresh- 
ened, and in half an hour's time the moon had dis- 
appeared, the night was black with flying scud, and 
the Goodwins were just a roar and tremble of surf, 
the spray leaping high in fierce collision and sweeping 
between the masts and through the rigging of the 
doomed ship with the weight and sting of leaden 
shot. One by one the masts went over the side 
like clay pipe-stems snapped off between the fingers. 
All was horror and confusion. She was a foreign 
barque, with a forecastle full of Dagos and such 
people, and they had clung to the ship until it was 
too late to leave her, for one reason and another — 
uppermost, no doubt, being the desire of preserving 
their property — until, indeed, their boats were 
wrecked by the falling spars, and the sea was sweep- 
ing their decks in cloud-like flashings of foam. 

It was between two and three hours before the 
lifeboat from Ramsgate came alongside. That boat 
is nearly always towed out, and something had gone 
wrong with the tug. By the time she had let go of 
the steamer and was hanging on by the barque's 




pq 



The Downs. 1 1 

quarter, with my friend Fish, her coxswain, roaring 
out instructions in the bold, brave tongue of the 
Ramsgate 'longshoreman to the shrieking, gesticu- 
lating huddle of foreigners who were sheltering 
themselves abaft some deck structure, the vessel had 
been utterly wrecked aloft ; she was already a sheer 
hulk hard and fast ; with a wild and ruined heap of 
spar and canvas rising and falling alongside of her, 
and dealing her volcanic shocks with every plunging 
wash of the coil of black seas bursting into giddy 
whiteness over her. There were dead men on her 
deck : wretches who had been slain by the fall of 
the masts, or who, lying stunned, had been strangled 
out of hand by the water betwixt the rails. This 
was the sort of scene to dream of and recreate on a 
warm, stirless, moonlit summer night, seated as I 
was upon a memorial of that bad loss of a ship. To 
think of her floating to her doom with the airy spires 
of her canvas pallid in the dusk as though feebly 
star-touched — all silent aboard her — a trembling 
green light like a glow r -worm on her starboard rail — 
a little haze round about the cabin skylight window 
faintly defining the figure of the captain or mate, w r ho 
sees nothing and heeds nothing ! Did they fire a gun 
aboard the Gull lightship as a hint ? Perhaps in the 
thickness of that night the lightsmen could not make 
sure of her ; but the true significance of these sounds 
comes out in the contrast between the aspect of that 
barque at the moment of her touching, with a 
shudder running through every timber, and passing 
like a shiver up the wan heights of cloths — and the 



12 The British Seas. 

short length of grinning fangs, upon one of which I 
sat musing on that quiet night. 

There is good work done by the lifeboat all round 
the coast, but no better work than in these waters. 
Ramsgate tops the list of life-savers hereabouts ; but 
then there is always a tug at hand to tow the boat 
out, and this renders her as indifferent to the quarter 
whence the wind blows as if she were a steamer 
herself. There are good boats at Broadstairs and at 
Deal and at Walmer ; but when the wind blows a 
heavy, dead inshore gale, what are the people belong- 
ing to them to do ? they can only look idly on whilst 
the Ramsgate steamer, with the boat belonging to 
that harbour in tow, heads into the storm with a 
helm steady for what is to be succoured. The life- 
boat is at the best but an unwieldy fabric. She is 
meant to be unsinkable, and the machinery that 
achieves this quality for her renders her, it must be 
confessed, an unsightly structure. Her masts are 
low, her canvas inadequate, and on a wind she will 
blow away to leeward like a bladder. I have some- 
times watched a match amongst lifeboats in a regatta, 
and admired the cleverness with which they drove 
with a straight wake when the wind was over their 
stern ; but a new face, I observed, was always placed 
upon their trick of sailing when, after putting their 
helm down to no purpose, they wore to come round 
again for their starting point. 

If there were no tug at Ramsgate there might be a 
general endeavour amongst the other boats stationed 
along this coast to head out for a wreck, let the wind 



The Dozens. 13 

blow as it might. But much more often than not it 
is an inshore wind, and the Ramsgate boat therefore 
has it all her own way. But it is a noble service, no 
matter what port the boat hails from. I have seen a 
deal of it in my time, have witnessed many rescues, 
one or two of which I have attempted to chronicle, 
and never recall what I have beheld without an 
emotion of enthusiasm that quickens the beat of 
my pulse. The honour, I may say the glory, of 
this work, is entirely the 'longshoreman's. It is the 
waterman who mans the boat and who imperils 
his life. There is nothing that galvanizes his figure 
so effectually as the lifeboat summons. A bell rings 
and instantly all is hurry. The beach— the pier— is 
filled with figures sprawling forwards in red-hot haste. 
If the men are in bed when the call is made they do 
not wait to dress, but snatch at the clothes which 
are next them and fight their way into the garments 
as they run. To appreciate all the meaning that 
enters into the expression "man the lifeboat," one 
should survey the scene of boiling Channel waters 
on some December or January midnight. The wind 
is pouring in thunder over the land, and all along 
from the base of the white cliffs rises an echo as of a 
ceaseless explosion of great guns. The black air is 
blind with flying sleet and rain ; but seaward there 
will be a coming and going of hoariness, a sort of 
feeble blinking of a dim and ghastly lustre that is not 
to be called light, made by sudden great upheavals of 
spray whipped and sent boiling in seething masses 
through the wind. In the town the streets are 



14 The British Seas. 

empty ; the few windy gaslights make a violent play 
of shadows ; casements are shaking, trees are roaring, 
every chimney seems to hold its wounded giant 
groaning horribly ; the edge of the blast as it howls 
round the corner has the sharpness of the scythe and 
smites like steel. Hark ! through the uproar of the 
gale a faint thud — a distant gun — strikes upon the 
ear. From the pier-head, buried in foam and the 
shadow of night, soars a rocket that sparkles bravely 
out as it sweeps with lightning-like velocity into the 
north-east. Another glance of light upon the flying 
obscurity seawards — a second gun ! — and presently 
you can distinguish a tiny point of brightness, burn- 
ing and waning, upon the verge of the vast midnight 
stretch of throbbing obscurity. It is a flare — the 
night signal of the shipwrecked. A ship is ashore: 
there are human lives to be saved ; the bell is 
furiously tolling, and out from their little houses, 
scrambling into their jackets as they race, the brave 
hearts are running to man the lifeboat. 

I believe if I were a lifeboatman I would rather 
sail through such a night as this I am endeavour- 
ing to describe than be towed through it. There 
will be some sort of ease in the posture of a 
buoyant fabric under canvas, let the sea be what 
it will. Though she be close-hauled the surge is 
still on her bow, and her long floating launches are 
not utterly intolerable. But to be dragged head 
on to it is miserable work indeed. The water flies 
in sheets in a very liquid canopy over the boat ; the 
men sit knee-deep in it, and will come very near 




a, 



The Downs, i 7 

to being frozen dead some while before they heave 
the ship they have to succour into view. She tows 
by too long a scope of rope to suffer her to obtain 
any sort of shelter from the tug ahead. Nor in- 
considerable are the sufferings of the steamboat's 
men in this sort of midnight excursion in the heart 
of a winter gale. The vessel is smothered from the 
" eyes " to the funnel casing, and the skipper on 
the bridge peers in vain to discover what has 
become of the forepart of his little ship. Her 
paddle-boxes are alternately buried, and at every 
roll one wheel or the other lifts sheer out of water, 
and may be seen revolving against the foam like 
the sails of a windmill. Nevertheless, there is a 
cabin aboard ; or on deck there is always a place 
that has a lee side, where a man may crouch and 
keep himself tolerably dry, and be able even to 
smoke a pipe. But there is nothing with a lee 
side belonging to it in the lifeboat. There is no 
cabin. The men may indeed find room to lie in a 
huddle, one on top of another in the bottom of the 
boat, in an inextricable confusion of sou'-westers, 
cork-jackets, and sea-boots ; but what sort of a 
mattress are they to find in planks which are above 
their knees with water, and what sort of warmth 
are they to obtain from such shelter as the thwarts 
of a lifeboat supply ? In wild, fierce, wintry weather, 
lifeboating is desperate work indeed ; a species of 
seafaring that is without parallel in any other walk 
of the vocation. What is the temptation ? It was 
half-a-sovereign a day, each man, and a pound for 

c 



1 8 The British Seas. 

night work ; and the pay was the same be the 
weather what it would. It will be admitted that 
there is nothing very potent in such rewards to 
coax men into hazarding their lives and into accept- 
ing the harshest extremities of suffering. I will 
not, indeed, say that this sovereign and this half- 
sovereign do not provide a small animation in 
themselves ; but no man who has witnessed the 
work can doubt that the true seminal spirit of it lies 
in a noble humanity, in intrepid resolution to save, 
without thought of what is to follow, whether it be 
applause, or emolument, or death. 

The risks are frightful. To be sure, the boats are 
self-righting, but the men in them are not ; and 
when a whole crew are rolled out overboard it is by 
no means inevitable that they shall all roll in again. 
Every man is equipped in a cork-jacket, which cer- 
tainly provides him with a chance ; but if he float 
away in the blackness and is no more heard of, his 
death is rendered distressing beyond expression 
by the protraction of his sufferings. He may be 
hours afloat without dying, enduring all the anguish 
of the cold, the slowly-killing drenchings of flying 
spray, and then perish when help is at hand. 
Another condition of the service, too, is the memo- 
ries it breeds. Amidst such a rude population as 
our 'longshoremen form, one might hardly hope to 
find so tender a sentiment as that of sympathetic 
recollection. Yet, in my own experience, I am able 
to say that for weeks and months men, formed 
apparently of the roughest and homeliest fibre, 



The Dozvns. 19 

with seemingly no more romance in their composi- 
tion than there is gravy in a cube of shipboard 
salt beef, have suffered horrors by day, have been 
unable to close their eyes by night, through memory 
of some dreadful sea tragedy they have had to bear 
a part in. 

I can recall one instance of this, and it much 
impressed me at the time. A ship named the 
Indian Chief went ashore on the Long Sand, to the 
northwards of the Goodwins. It was such weather 
as never could I recall the like of — a hurricane out 
of the north-east ; all betwixt ocean and sky boiling 
with snow, and such a sea as brought the heart 
into my throat, viewing it, as I did, from over the 
edge of the North Foreland. The boat and the 
tug were two nights away; the magnificent spirit 
of the men defied the weather, and they continued 
to hunt for the ship, resolved not to shift their 
helm for home until they had boarded the wreck 
and saved the people, if any man remained to be 
saved. They sighted her at daybreak on the second 
day, a mere filament of mast in the heart of a 
very hell of warring white waters. The lifeboat 
slipped and bore down, and found the ship there 
breaking up, with her foremast standing and a 
knot of seamen in the foretop ; her mizzenmast lay 
over the starboard quarter, and to it were lashed a 
number of dead men — men who had heen alive when 
the spar fell, and who had drowned in full sight of 
their shipmates above. The boat rescued the living, 
and was about to let go when her coxswain sung 

C 2 



20 The British Seas. 

out, " Pick up that poor fellow first ! " He pointed 
to a figure of a man who was leaning on his breast 
over the spar. His gaze was fixed upon the boat ; 
his lips seemed busy with ineffectual articulation ; 
the heave of the sea swayed him into postures and 
motions of entreaty. But he was dead, and had 
been dead for hours. One of the lifeboat's men 
was haunted by this dreadful mocking image of 
life for days afterwards. He told me that he could 
not sleep ; that when he lay down in the dark the 
figure was at the foot of his bed, from which it 
would force him to spring, covered with perspiration 
and in the utmost anguish of mind, to find relief 
by taking a turn outside. 

Ramsgate, we may suppose, is the most popular 
of the seaside towns which lie within the embrace 
of the two famous points of Foreland. This will 
not be deemed very high praise perhaps when it is 
considered that in addition to Ramsgate there are 
but Broadstairs and Deal — Walmer being a mere 
extension of the latter town. Ramsgate is greatly 
beloved by the cockney — not more so perhaps than 
Margate ; between them, indeed, they fairly divide 
the heart of 'Arry. That Margate should be very 
highly favoured by the lower classes of the metro- 
polis is not hard to understand ; whatever is allur- 
ing to the East-end imagination and tastes are, at 
Margate, accentuated with all the judgment and 
skill of persons who know their business as enter- 
tainers. But Ramsgate is without a Hall-by-the- 
Sea ; it is without a Menagerie. Its sands in 



The Downs. 23 

the height of summer do, indeed, support a few 
nigger melodists, a Punch-and-Judy show, and one 
or two other diversions of the kind. But the local 
police keep a very strict eye upon the respectability 
of the place ; and certainly no baits of any sort are 
offered to the cockney to tempt him to take lodgings 
in Ramsgate. Yet to Ramsgate he comes in a very 
great multitude ; he is to be seen overrunning the 
place in suits of clothes of indescribable hues and 
pattern ; he gallops madly along on the back of the 
donkey ; he crowds the pleasure sailing-boat to suffo- 
cation, and loads her down to a strake upon which no 
Board of Trade official would sanction the painting 
of Mr. Plimsoll's disc. Happily he is powerless to 
deform the picturesqueness of the town. A pretty 
place it is, viewed from the sea ; I know of none 
prettier ; the milk-white cliffs contrast pleasantly 
with the green and slate, the red and cream of the 
houses which line the summits. The Granville 
Hotel is a bold and imposing seamark, and rounds 
off the town at its eastern extremity with a hand- 
some heap of glowing colour, of sparkling window, of 
waving banner, and castellated wing. It is a pity 
that the line harbour should be very nearly dead 
and gone. Certainly, if it is not quite gone, it is 
fast going. The excavator seems to me to toil only 
for the smacksman and the waterman ; for if not 
for theirs, then I know not for whose keels the 
slime and ooze are lifted and despatched to sea with 
soul-subduing monotony of regularity. 

Time was when the west gully and the length of 



24 The British Seas. 

the east pier were crowded with vessels of burthen — 
as burthen then went — two, three, and even four 
deep. Those were high old times for the local 
shipping agents ; the era of cable-slipping and divers 
other sorts of nautical caper-cutting ; when a wink 
was as good as a nod, and when the worthy folks of 
Lloyds were satisfied to pay, with a humble thanks- 
giving that the bill was not twice as long. Very few 
vessels enter Ramsgate Harbour now. The explana- 
tion is that it has been ruined by steam ; but this 
reason is not quite satisfactory. Whoever has any 
acquaintance with the Downs must be fully aware 
that there is still a great number of sailing craft 
afloat, to all of which Ramsgate ought to be useful 
in a time of difficulty. Yet it seems to me that a 
ship must be in dire distress indeed before she will 
make for Ramsgate Harbour. Have not the exces- 
sive charges something to do with this ? The cost 
of maintenance is probably considerable ; but surely 
the dues are out of all proportion to the accommoda- 
tion offered by piers without metals, without steam, 
with appliances of so crude and primitive a species 
that it is impossible to view them without laughter. 

Yet as a picture the harbour gains by the policy 
that has long stultified and is now destroying it. It 
is hard to imagine a more animated and engaging 
scene than the space of water betwixt the piers offers 
on some breezy autumn morning when a fleet of 
smacks are getting under way for the North Sea 
fishing-grounds. Some are towed out three and four 
abreast, with the white water flashing between them, 



The Doivns. 25 

the livelies aboard them sprawling about in their 
enormous boots, the red canvas thundering. As they 
clear the entrance the tide catches them, and away 
they go in fine style, scattering as the tow-ropes are 
let slip, and plunging like galloping cart-horses as 
they take the first of the seas and wash away to 
the northward. Others again, to save towage-charge, 
" ratch," out as it is called, and a spirited sight it is 
to witness. The seamanship of the fellows is 
excellent ; they appear to know their little ships as a 
man the rorse he has ridden for years; you see a 
smack under a heavy press leaning down to it till her 
waterways are under and heading direct for the 
granite of the pier ; her bowsprit seems to be in the 
act of spearing the solid wall, when down goes her 
helm, round she spins like some waltzing girl nimble 
of foot ; in a breath or two all is flattened in fore 
and aft, and she is smoking through it on the other 
tack. But there are other details of interest 
besides the fishing craft ; notably the French three- 
masted lugger, with her enormous rotundity of bow 
and thickness of scantling. She goes full of men, 
often with several women aboard, and the rude 
hubbub of the marine patois of Gravelines, of Calais, 
and of Boulogne, furnishes an odd contrast of noise 
to the calls, shouts, and talk of the booted represen- 
tatives of the fishing populations of Penzance, 
Shoreham, Lowestoft, and Plymouth, whose smacks 
congregate about those of the artless Wooden-Shoes 
on the west side of the harbour. There is always a 
crazy old tug panting to and fro, obnoxious to the 



26 The British Seas. 

eye and full of business, dragging barges loaded with 
mud or towing out some unspeakable figure of a 
brigantine, which came in the other day filled with 
coal that depressed her to her covering boards, and 
now swims out gaunt with tall and worm-eaten sides, 
which are scarcely to be made to stand upright by 
the few tons of chalk which have been pitched into 
her for ballast. 

Ramsgate, however, never looks so well as by 
night — a calm summer night, when the lingering 
rustic hectic in the west throws into a black mass 
the Catholic Church and buildings at the extremity 
of the town, and when the lights of the foreshore are 
springing up, striking tremulous lines of gold into 
the placid surface of the inner harbour or upon the 
oil-like breast of water that steeps to the sea-wall 
where the railway pierces the chalk terraces. There 
is real beauty in the picture at such a time. Rams- 
gate is prodigal in lamps, and when all is in full 
blaze she becomes a very Milky Way of radiance. 
She pencils her extent with fire ; and, viewing the 
coast from the sea, you might, of a summer night, 
imagine that every evening brings around its obliga- 
tion of festival or of celebration to the place. There 
are lights low down under the cliff along what is 
called the Marina ; there are lights along the length 
of the narrow iron pier that forks out from the foot 
of the cliff that is crowned by the Granville Hotel ; 
there are lights down upon the sands where the rail- 
way and its station are ; and lights sparkle at the 
pier ends in divers colours. Against all this brilliance 



The Downs. 27 

the motionless sails of a craft lying in the harbour 
waiting for a slant of air will show in spaces of liquid 
gloom, and impart a singular beauty of shadow to 
the faintness of white cliff past them, and its 
spangled heights, and its glittering base. 

By day, however, the seaward view of Ramsgate is 
much deformed by the railway. I can remember 
the time when the sands went in billows of gold to 
the foot of the huge spurs of chalk, and when the eye 
could sweep a magnificent expanse and length of 
foreshore, starting from the pier-wall and stretching 
on over many a hundred fathom, till it rounded in a 
noble platform out of sight, past some tall shoulder 
of cliff drawing on to Broadstairs. Now, instead of 
the cry of the seagull, it is the hideous whistle of the 
locomotive. The secret memories of the staring, 
milk-white, fortress-like front have been transformed 
into the impertinence of glaring advertisements. All 
is smoke and rattle, the screech of the engine, the 
distracting jar of shunting. It is a convenience that 
has ruined the sands. It is, of course, a convenience 
to be able to run up to London in two hours ; but all 
the same the sands are not as they were ; they are 
full of holes and gullies, and bathing grows more 
dangerous every year. 



CHAPTER II 

the downs {continued). 

The 'longshoreman — Historic associations — Shipping in the 
Downs — The galley-punt — Deal boatmen — Smuggling — 
Broadstairs and Charles Dickens — Sandwich. 

Compared with Deal, Ramsgate, in respect of its 
maritime interest, makes but a poor figure. It has, 
however, I believe, a licensed pilot, who is sometimes 
fortunate enough to fall in with a job. At long inter- 
vals there will blow into the offing some little barque, 
some little foreign brig with the clews of her top- 
sails out of hail of the yardarms and a jack at the 
fore, and she is the licensed pilot's opportunity. 
He springs into a wherry and away he goes ; but 
there is also a licensed pilot at Broadstairs — he, too, 
accepts the jack at the fore as his opportunity, and 
will start also, and then there is a race. It is a 
contest, however, that excites but little interest. It 
is universally felt along the coast that this licensing 
of pilots is an injustice to the 'longshoreman. 
There are men belonging to Deal, Ramsgate, and 
Broadstairs, to the full as capable of navigating a 
ship in these waters as any Trinity House man ; but 
they are forbidden to do so, and are punished, along 



The Downs. 29 

with the master of the ship who employs them, if 
they are caught. But hunger renders them defiant, 
and as the smallness of their charges, in com- 
parison with those of the licensed pilots, is an en- 
couragement to shipmasters to darkly and covertly 
employ them, they still manage to earn here and 
there a few pounds. How, nevertheless, the 'long- 
shoreman contrives to live is a problem I have never 
yet been able to resolve. The summer season is 
perilously short and the winter inordinately long. 
The wherry is hauled ashore before the autumn has 
fairly set in, and there is nothing more to be done 
with her till June comes round again. The chances 
supplied by hovelling are slender and scarce worth 
naming. A man may not pilot without a license — 
how, then, does the 'longshoreman live ? It is sur- 
mised that his wife takes in washing ; but when it 
happens that the 'longshoremen make a numerous 
population, it is impossible to suppose that all the 
women of his order are laundresses. He sells fish ; 
he will paint a house ; he will work aboard a collier ; 
failing everything he will lean against a post, in 
which art he may certainly be said to excel. Built 
up in fearnought trousers of ponderous quality, stiff 
and taut in boots and in many thicknesses of jersey, 
watertight about the head, and possessed of pockets 
in which he is able to bury his arms to above the 
elbows, the 'longshoreman of the Downs' district is 
the most incomparable of loungers. Still, poor as 
he is, he usually seems to bear about with him the 
value of a pipe of tobacco and a pot of ale. One 



30 The British Seas. 

cannot but think kindly of him. He is often the 
central memory of the seaside holiday ; he carries 
us out a-fishing ; and he encourages us to continue 
the sport long after the misgiving that there is no 
fish in the sea has become a conviction. His cry 
of " Boat, sir ? — beautiful day for a row, mum ! " 
vibrates upon the ear, and remains a cheerful 
recollection, even in the heart of a November Lon- 
don fog. 

Time was when there was plenty of good fishing 
to be had off Ramsgate ; but the pleasure trawlers 
have confirmed the injurious labours of the 
" toshers," and the ground has been so overdragged 
that its yield is now utterly insignificant. Further 
south there is better sport, and off Deal there is 
often excellent fishing. The finest whitings I have 
ever seen have been caught abreast of Walmer ; 
shoals of herrings and mackerel come in close to the 
shingle in their respective seasons, and cod, codling, 
pouting, dabs, and plaice are abundant ; but the sole 
is a rare fish, though large ones are occasionally 
hooked. Whether, however, one gets a bite or not, 
whether one catches anything or not, there is a 
dreamy pleasure in overhanging the gunwale of a 
boat on a quiet, slumberous, warm afternoon, that 
to many ranks highest amongst the enjoyments of 
the holiday outing. Life is at a distance ; sounds 
by remoteness are sweetened into music ; the cry 
of the hawker, the pealing of a bell, the stir of 
vehicles, combine into a note of softness which 
steals soothingly upon the ear, across the smooth 



The Downs. 31 

and gleaming surface of the intervening water. 
The fishing-line over the side inspires expectation 
enough to keep one awake, but it is a drowsy wake- 
fulness that has in it the rest of slumber, leaving 
the faculties still sensible of the peace, the beauty, 
the coolness round about, the soft respiration of the 
swell, the vision of strange objects gliding past the 
boat through the glass-clear green profound, the 
inexpressible sweetness of old ocean's breath. Yet 
one's romantic moods are not left long undisturbed. 
The boatman, like the poor, is always with you, 
and his volubility is commonly proportioned to the 
quality of the sport. The less you catch the more 
he has to say. He converses with an eye to extend- 
ing the time, and his language, if not always en- 
gaging, is at least diverting with the prosaics of the 
'longshore vocation. I knew a worthy man named 
John Goldsmith, a Ramsgate boatman, and perhaps 
the most talkative man on the English coast. He 
had taken Charles Dickens out fishing with him ; 
Wilkie Collins had also used his boat ; and amongst 
others he would tell of were Benjamin Webster, 
General Tom Thumb, and Commodore Nutt. The 
General, he would say, lighted a cigar nearly as big 
as himself, and sat sucking at it very steadily, occa- 
sionally standing up to look over the gunwale, which 
he was too short to overhang. But in a little while 
the ground-swell or the cigar, or perhaps both, 
proved too much for him ! he was oppressed with 
nausea, and was glad to get ashore. John Gold- 
smith would boast that Charles Dickens drew a 



32 The British Seas. 

highly correct portrait of him, and printed it in 
"Household Words" or "All the Year Round." 
He had a vivid recollection of Benjamin Webster. 
He rowed that excellent actor out to a red buoy, 
where in those days there was some good fish to be 
caught. Webster looked a little pale and ill, but 
sat nevertheless manfully feeling for fish with his 
line. " Tell 'ee then what happened, ' Goldsmith 
would say, " I got a boite and hooked a plaice size 
o' moy arm. He was a stiff 'un to draw up, and I 
had to put some strength into the job, and in swing- 
ing him inboards the flat of him struck the gent 
right across the cheek and knocked his wig over- 
board. He hadn't been reg'lar sick afore, but I 
allow that the smack of that there cold, moist 
sarface of fish about did his business. He took no 
notice of his wig, but just lay over the side, helpless 
as a young lady in a gale of wind." John Goldsmith 
found his yarns acceptable to his customers, and 
was never at a loss. Probably, had he lived, we 
should have heard of the Archbishop of Canterbury 
going out a-fishing with him ; and, indeed, one 
might have thought him modest had he stopped at 
his Grace. 

The Downs — the famous space of water where 
black-eyed Susan came aboard — lie over your ship's 
bow as she rounds the North Foreland, coming out 
of the North Sea, or from the River Thames. The 
Goodwin Sands are on your port bow, the range of 
white cliff on your starboard ; and right ahead is a 
space of water which, were it land, would be more 



The Downs, 2>Z 

consecrated by memory than any equal area of soil, 
point to what country you may. Let any man run 
through the earlier annals of these kingdoms : the 
sea fights were nearly all here ; hereabouts the 
armies, glittering with helmet and breastplate, with 
spear and pennon, were embarking or arriving ; here 
the vast convoys were preparing to weigh ; here 
were adventured most of the attacks of the foreign 
foe against the country ; up yonder bight, called 
Pegwell Bay, floated Saint Augustine to as high as 
Ebb's Fleet ; a little further along Julius Caesar is 
supposed to have landed. Enough yet remains of 
old Sandown Castle to bring Colonel Hutchinson 
to the memory and to fire the imagination with 
thoughts of deeds done here whilst it was yet such 
another fortress as the grim-looking castle of Deal, 
and the one beyond it at Walmer, where Nelson left 
a card upon Billy Pitt on finding him in bed, and 
where the old Iron Duke fetched his last breath. 
The history of these waters is a panorama of 
splendour, a gorgeous arras into which is woven 
very much indeed of what has gone to the making of 
Britannia. Just past the Goodwin Sands yonder, 
the ships of the great Armada were chased by those 
lions of the deep, Frobisher, and Fenton, and Drake, 
and the others of them. Abreast of that cold height 
of South Foreland Blake curled his whiskers and let 
fly a shotted and sulphureous intimation to Tromp 
to lower his flag ; in other words, to pull off his hat 
to Britannia's sea-sovereignty. But a few cables' 
lengths further on that brave and honest old 

D 



34 The British Seas. 

Admiral, Sir William Monson, requested a like 
obeisance from the haughty Don, and with one ship 
to oppose a squadron would have sunk the 
Spaniards or foundered himself sooner than be 
denied. Let us but consider the flags which this 
small surface of narrow sea has reflected : Shovel, 
and bold Benbow ; Ayscue, and noble-spirited 
Rooke ; Vernon, and Hood, and Hawke ; and last, 
but always first, the glorious bunting of Nelson him- 
self, floating for weeks in defiance from the mast- 
head of the frigate from whose quarter-deck the 
Hero of the Nile was keeping a bright look-out for 
the flotilla and the troops of the warrior Boney, as 
the sailors called him. 

There is, indeed, plenty to think about and plenty 
to look at as you come sailing or steaming into 
these Downs. Sometimes, but very seldom, the 
water is a bare waste ; then there must be a soldier's 
wind blowing, good for the inward as well as for 
the outward bounders. But for the most part the 
congregation is lively, and frequently thick. Every 
species of craft brings up in the Downs, saving, of 
course, the great ocean palaces. To the land-going 
eye there would seem but little variety in the rigs ; but 
the nautical gaze may, with a little patience, witness 
almost every fabric that hails from north of the Medi- 
terranean. One is occasionally astonished, too, by 
manifestations of survivals, of a sort to make a sailor 
stare as though he beheld a marine spectre. It was 
but the other day that I saw a frigate all of the olden 
time — such a frigate as Blackwood's Euryalus; such 







The Doivns. .35 



a frigate as the Theseus or the Shannon — sailing 
through the Gulls. I searched in vain for a hint of 
a funnel. She was of timber ; her gunports were 
closed, her bowsprit had the steeve of an old East 
Indiaman's; she carried a standing jib, her topsails 
were single with four reefs to the main, and her royal 
yards came close under the trucks ; her slight heel to 
port disclosed a line of yellow metal, and, though 
but of one tier of guns, she stood upon the water like 
a cask. It was like going back fifty, nay, eighty 
years to see her. A deep-laden screw, a veritable 
ocean-tramp, passed her ; and, somehow, such was 
the reality of the ship, such was the fitness of the tall, 
spacious-winged frigate to the scene I surveyed, that 
it was the steamboat which seemed to me to be the 
anachronism ! The war-vessel flew a small Swedish 
colour and floated stately and bravely out of sight, 
watched by me (who would rather have seen her 
than the grandest armoured battleship that now 
swims) till her spanker fluttered out of sight past 
the round of the Foreland. 

It is commonly the south-westerly wind that fills 
the Downs. Ships come struggling to abreast of 
Deal and Walmer, and then bring up to await a slant 
that will enable them to get round the South Fore- 
land into the Channel. The detention is often 
cruelly protracted. I have known ships to lie six 
weeks in the Downs. The shift of wind they require 
never seems to happen. Day after day the dog-vane 
points as though some demon had crawled aloft and 
fixed it with a nail. It has often amused me on 

D 2 







6 The British Seas. 



such occasions to bring a powerful telescope to bear 
upon the people on board and observe their coun- 
tenances. The constant glancings round the sea — 
the sour stare aloft — the darkening of purple-nosed 
visages to the forecastle-fancies which the dead-on- 
end wind excites — the impatient walk — the frequent 
flourish of a large fist in the direction from 
which the breeze blows ; all this is irresistible when 
one's acquaintance with the seafaring character 
enables one to understand the moods and the 
language which these pacings, these grimacings, and 
cortortions of posture illustrate. But six weeks in 
the Downs ! Figure lying off the cold and windy 
town of Deal in some small lump of a brigantine, 
whose masts are for ever swaying like a baton in the 
hand of a band conductor ! Nothing to look at but 
a foreshore of shingle and luggers and little houses, 
most of them small shanties of tarred timber ; and 
nothing to think of but when the wind is going to 
change : listening all day long to the weary groaning 
of the bones of the tossed and harassed carcase one 
is aboard of; and of a night incessantly rolling out 
of one's bunk whenever the ship, swinging to her 
anchor, comes athwart the rim of the sea ! It is 
generally understood that sailors are not choice in 
their language ; but, then, what vocation is more 
exasperating than that of the mariner's ? When I 
think of six weeks' detention in the Downs, and add 
to that reflection the several considerations of the 
salted horse, of unspeakable pork, of biscuit honey- 
combed with worms, of wet, cold, and kicks, of poor 



The Downs. 39 

pay and Dutch seamen, I cannot feel greatly 
astonished that the nautical mind should at long 
intervals utter itself in a few gentle sea blessings. 

But from the shore the ships at anchor make a 
fine show. We are not sailors ; we are not aboard ; 
and, therefore, are not sufferers. We may be per- 
mitted then to view the scene with delight as a pic- 
ture, without distressing ourselves in pitying the 
unfortunate Jacks who have to lie out there waiting 
for a shift of wind. It was but the other day that I 
was looking at a collection of upwards of two 
hundred sail of ships at anchor. They had all come 
together as if by magic. When I had gone to bed 
the night before there was but a single craft 
straining abreast of Deal town. The wind had 
been a light southerly air ; the water had stretched 
flat and black to the Goodwins, with here and there 
a star-gleam in it, so little did the brushing of the 
delicate breeze tarnish the mirroring power of that 
moonless breast of sea. But next morning when I 
looked, a very forest of shipping filled the arena of 
the anchorage. Nearly every species of craft had 
come together in the darkness, and there they lay 
with a strong south-westerly wind blowing through 
them, and a sea running with weight enough in it 
to put the largest of the structures into motion. It 
was a true sea-piece ; with its sky of pale liquid 
azure, its large stately-sailing masses of cloud rising 
with a milk-white softness off the coast of France ; 
the water a dark and sparkling green, rich and 
flashful with heads of froth, and the vessels of all 



4-0 The British Seas. 

sorts in the heart of the windy day coming and 
going in light and shadow as the eastern sun sank 
into or leapt from the edge of the bodies of vapour. 
In every vessel's side, lifting wet from the brine, 
shone the glory of the morning in stars — a ceaseless 
winking of white fires like flashes from artillery. 
Upon every head of sea, as it broke against the 
bows of the ships and went smoking away upon the 
wind in a mist of crystals and diamonds and prisms, 
there was painted a little rainbow. Where to 
witness the like of such combinations and contrasts 
of colour as I found in the Downs that morning I 
believe I could not say. The slate-coloured metal 
plates of steamers ; the brilliant wet black sides of 
sailing craft ; the white and ebony lengths of broken 
ports ; the dancing gleams of brass and glass ; the 
red, the blue, the green of bunting ; the lines of 
radiant flags, denoting the ships' numbers ; the 
vision, past all these anchored craft, of an upward- 
bound vessel chased by a tug — a structure foaming 
through it from some antipodean port under full 
breasts of canvas that clothed her in marble-white 
cloths from her waterways to her skysail-masts — 
such an assemblage of tints, such effects of graceful 
movements, such variety and play of light and 
gloom, of bursts of glorious splendour and of sullen 
violent shadow, I have never before witnessed. 

Conspicuous amongst the shipping was the galley- 
punt — a craft that hails from Deal, and that is to be 
met with only in these waters — under a fragment of 
lug, with three men of a crew sitting to windward. 



The Downs. 41 

She was sweeping with the ease and buoyancy of the 
gull over seas which were making even the brigs and 
barques round about bow to their hawsepipes. She 
is, I suppose, the one illustration yet extant of the 
skill of the Deal boatmen. The famous lugger sur- 
vives, but she finds little employment. High and 
dry she lies upon Deal beach, suggesting times when 
smuggling was a roaring trade, when fresh anchors 
and cables were in constant demand, and when her 
crew by the work of a week might earn money 
enough to set them up as gentlemen for life. Her 
services are scarcely needed nowadays, and such 
slender shipping requirements as yet continue here- 
abouts are supplied by the galley-punts. They are 
the carriers of the Downs ; they act as bumboats ; 
they serve as a communication between the ships 
and the shore ; they convey pilots to vessels ; and in 
all weathers may be seen roaming about in search of 
jobs. They are stoutly built boats, but undecked, 
and therefore require such handling, having regard 
to the seas they encounter, as only men who have 
been brought up to the work from boyhood are equal 
to. The launching of these little craft from the 
beach ranks very prominent amongst the interests of 
Deal. When a boat arrives from a cruise she is 
hauled, by means of a tall and crazy-looking old 
capstan, high and dry up on the shingle, where she 
rests until there is occasion to " go off" again, as it 
is called. There must be a bad beach of surf on to 
hinder her from starting when a summons comes, 
so expert are the fellows who man her, and so dire 



42 The British Seas. 

are the wants which the long winter begets. Figure 
a lead-coloured day, a gale blowing out of the east, 
an horizon shrouded by rain and sleet to within a 
mile or so of the shore. Some steamer looming 
large in the flying haze is sighted ; she has a pilot to 
land ; there are a few shillings to be earned ; the 
boat must be launched, and a crew of three, helped 
by others, spring to release her. The surf is large 
and thunderous, and one looks on, making little 
doubt that the boat will fill and be rolled on shore 
again as she slips into the white and throbbing 
dazzle. But nothing of the sort happens ; her gun- 
wales are seized by a number of muscular hands, 
and down the slope of peebles she rushes with roar- 
ing keel, her crew tumbling into her as her stern 
smites the yeast. In a breath she is off and away, 
clear of the surf and the breakers, and a few moments 
later you will see her foaming through it to a flattened 
sheet, now sinking, till nothing but the yard of her 
lug shows, now soaring till she hangs poised like a 
toy on some flickering head of sea dissolving in a 
wide rush of froth under her. 

This sort of interest is wanting at Ramsgate and 
Broadstairs. It is peculiar to Deal ; and it is a 
survival that contributes not a little to the old-world, 
salt-water flavour of the place. At Ramsgate and 
Broadstairs the 'longshoremen own wmerries, and are 
called watermen ; but at Deal the fellows who put off 
are pre-eminently boatmen. The distinction may 
seem a little nice, but it is easily rendered intelligible 
by reference to the vocational practice of the men. 



The Downs. 



43 



The Ramsgate or Broadstairs man will take you out 
for a row on a fine day ; so, too, will the Deal man, 
but the Ramsgate or Broadstairs man does not think 
of getting a living by hovelling or hunting the waters 
in search of ships whose captains have a pilot to land 
or who want assistance in other ways ; whereas this 
is precisely the dominant business of the Deal man. 



,~^~r~- 




On a Quay. From a sketch by David Cox. 



He is a descendant of the old race of smugglers, not 
degenerate by any means in his view of the Revenue, 
but deprived of the opportunities his forefathers 
enjoyed — not because he is without a lugger or 
because the nights are no longer as black as they 
formerly were — but because smuggling, as Customs' 
imposts now go, scarcely repays a man for the 
very heavy risks which attend it. Some small 
" running" still goes on, of course, but it is of the 



44 The British Seas. 

meagrest sort, and cuts a most insignificant figure 
alongside the old great hauls of silk and tea, of 
tobacco and spirits. What is it now if it be not a 
little pocketful of black cakes of tobacco ? 

But though Deal was the headquarters of 
smuggling in the time when a frigate lay in the 
Downs, and detachments of her crew were sent 
ashore to protect the Revenue under the name of 
" blockaders," — prior to the establishment of the 
preventive man, as we now have him — such romance 
as the contraband traffic possesses must, I think, be 
sought for down among the cliffs in Pegwell Bay and 
in the white chalk range betwixt Ramsgate and 
Broadstairs. For there you have the genuine thing 
in the shape of the old smuggler's lair ; winding 
corridors hewn out of the solid chalk ; secret subterra- 
nean retreats, whose grave-like stillness is scarcely 
vexed by the dull voice of the sea washing the base 
of the natural ramparts. The sympathies of nature 
seem to have been enlisted by the Ramsgate and 
Broadstairs smuggler ; and though the signs of his 
pickaxe are very visible, yet the exploring of one of his 
corridors might make one fancy that old Earth her- 
self had gone to work for him, had made a home for 
him in her heart, and pleasantly concealed him by 
growths of greenery above and by boulders and con- 
venient spurs below. Refuges and storing-places of 
this sort at Deal are artificial. There are no cliffs, 
consequently holes could not be made ; and the 
smuggler had to build what he wanted. Many 
smugglers' houses in the old town are still standing* 



The> Downs. 45 

and their occupants are incessantly making fresh 
discoveries of secret places ; of such a very shrewd, 
constructive genius were the race of contrabandists 
possessed. A wall is to be papered, and to the 
general surprise a small panel, yielding an aperture 
big enough to receive the figure of a boy, is exposed. 
When it is penetrated a short flight of mouldy steps 
are encountered, and to the amazement of the tenant 
two or three rooms, of whose existence the oldest 
inhabitant apparently had no knowledge, are dis- 
closed. There are probably now people at Deal who 
would not recognize as their own the houses they 
lived in were the mysteries of the buildings laid bare. 
Broadstairs has a charm which many might think 
superior to the quaintness of Deal. Its short length 
of pier has a black-letter look, that, be its age what 
it will, still carries the mind back to the days when 
the passing ships lowered their topsails in salutation 
of the figure of the Virgin Mary in the little church 
hard by the spot that is spanned by the arch. 
Charles Dickens loved the old town, and printed 
some delightful things about it in his serials. The 
high and windy building he occupied stands like a 
foreland lighthouse, and we should think that there 
must have been times when the imagination he 
exercised for the novel he wrote there abandoned 
itself to concern for the safety of the windows. That 
Bleak House, as it is called, should never have been 
unroofed is not a little surprising. It looks every 
quarter of the wind in the eye, and certainly nowhere 
on the east coast does it blow harder than where the 



46 The British Seas. 

structure memorable as the residence of the famous 
novelist defiantly opposes its glass and its chimney- 
pots to the elements. Broadstairs has a pretty bit 
of foreshore. Its bight of yellow sands has a 
wonderful air of English homeliness, of genial and 
hospitable warmth. The wherries in a group of 
bright colours ride quietly in the shadow of the old 
pier ; the surf sings with the note of a fountain as it 
slides up and down the heap of shingle to the left ; 
and a true marine 'longshore garnish is present in 
the form of the " Tartar Frigate Inn," with its sign of 
a ship that carries the fancy back to the days of the 
famous Captain Lockhart, the terror of the hardiest 
French privateersmen. There is no more popular 
resort than Broadstairs, but it attracts a sort of 
people very different from those who crowd the 
lodgings at Margate and Ramsgate in summer. It 
is quiet, it is exclusive, and exactly fits the word 
" genteel," that was good form in the heyday of the 
little place. 

There are no marked contrasts, however, in the 
shore-going features of this district until you get to 
Sandwich. The change from Broadstairs to Rams- 
gate is not very pronounced ; but the change from 
Ramsgate to Sandwich may be compared to a swift 
transition from Cheapside to a country churchyard. 
At Ramsgate, in summer-time, all is bustle and 
crowd ; the streets are alive with excursionists, the 
atmosphere is hoarse with the throats of coster- 
mongers, pianos are in every room, and German 
bands at every corner. But at Sandwich, in the very 



The Downs. 47 

height of the summer, the same deadness and stagna- 
tion of the fossilized condition is visible. All is 
hushed ; the air is flavoured with a smell of dust, and 
a coldness as of the decay of centuries penetrates the 
system, even in the dog-days, as one enters this 
venerable and fast-crumbling relic of ancient times. 
I never think of Sandwich without regretting that it 
is not preserved as an old ruin might be — in the 
integrity of its own mouldiness and decay. The 
senses are shocked by innovations here : the gas- 
lamp, for instance, affects one as a wrong; what 
should illuminate these grass-grown streets, these 
dim and leaning houses, but the quivering lustre of 
the oil-flame staggering windily in some swinging 
lanthorn of horn or of crude glass ? Why should 
there be a modern water supply ? Why not some pic- 
turesque town pump, or some immemorial well, from 
which the soldiers of Caesar might have refreshed 
themselves, or with which the warriors of Edward 
III. moistened their parched tongues ? Sandwich 
still has the curfew ; but what can be her theories of 
picturesque fitness when, despite such another antique 
knell as rings for all time in Grey's " Elegy," the town 
suffers a real policeman to walk about the streets, 
draped in the Corporation livery, and looking on the 
whole very much like a policeman of Deal or 
Ramsgate ? Everything should be in keeping here. 
We construct lath-and-pasteboard structures to 
represent old English streets ; but at Sandwich you 
have the real thing as Queen Elizabeth viewed it, as 
generation after generation has known it ; and the 



48 The British Seas. 

hand of the improver should not be allowed to meddle 
with it. The spirit of antiquity is on the side of 
Sandwich, and makes a sort of sacrilege of the 
application to the aged town of all ideas animated by 
modern sentiment. There is a .regatta, for intance, 
it is ludicrous to think of a regatta in connection 
with Sandwich ; let us talk of a morris dance, of 
Maid Marian, of the antique caper-cutting of fast 
days and feast days ; but not of regattas here ! The 
very river flows to and from the town in a sort of 
senile trickling, and a kind of violence is done to its 
narrow banks and its bed of slime — in which I 
believe the great ship of Pope Paul still lies buried — 
by the clamours and impertinences of the modern 
aquatic festival. 

Sandwich is like an old black-letter book upon 
which one could long continue to pore ; but it is 
stranded high and dry ; it yields but a glimpse of 
the sea, and the marine interests of the district are at 
a distance from it. It is to Deal and Walmer that 
one must come for a sight of the Downs ! and he 
who has the good fortune to sight this little space of 
narrow sea when it is full of shipping, whether it be 
by night with the high moon riding, or by day when 
the gale is fresh, and the seas are running in snow, 
will carry away with him a memory which he will 
not let die. 



CHAPTER III 

DOWN CHANNEL. 

Thames below bridge— The clocks— Historic interests— Graves- 
end— Speed of steamers— Passenger ships formerly— Dover 
and Folkestone— Lydd—Romney— Hastings— Eastbourne 

— Brighton. 

I suppose there is no river in the world comparable 
with the Thames in the variety, beauty, and human 
significance of its shows. It does not take very long 
for a man to pass from one extreme into another : 
from the summer colours and garden-like elegance of 
sloping emerald lawns, of structures of grace and 
charm, of a surface of steel-bright water mirroring 
the white shapes of swans, and reflecting in its 
margin whatever of tender shadow or of refulgent 
hue its banks have to paint upon it ; to pass, I say, 
from all that is reposeful, gentle, and engaging in 
mile after mile of purely English scenery, into the 
noise and business of the chocolate-coloured stream, 
as it muddily foams against the supporters of London 
Bridge and sweeps its flotilla of dumb barges into 
the aromatic regions of Bugsby's Reach and the Isle 
of Dogs. 

It may be, however, that a man is not to be 

E 



50 The British Seas. 

charged with want of taste for avowing that his 
sympathies are rather below than above bridge. 
The swan, the angler, the houseboat, the lock, 
the little sparkling creek sulking off into some 
verdant niche of bankside — upon such things the eye 
will dwell with a delight that presently languishes ; 
but the attention must be of a very flimsy sort that is 
to be easily wearied by the scene of the Thames from 
London Bridge to Gravesend, and on yet to where 
the shores of the noble river dissolve upon the 
oceanic atmosphere off Sheppey. 

I am acquainted with no more interesting voyage 
than the run from some one of the docks of the Port 
of London — as high up as you will — to Gravesend. 
My own special leaning is towards the East India 
Docks. From them it was that I always sailed 
away when I was at sea as a sailor. The very name 
awakens a crowd of ghostly memories. Once again 
the old Brunswick Hotel is in " full fig," doing a 
roaring business, with hungry midshipmen, fresh 
from twelve months of " salt-horse," eating roast- 
beef and delicious cauliflowers with the voracity of 
sharks, whilst their pleased papas look smilingly on ; 
the air resounds with the tempestuous shouts of Jacks 
at the capstans warping in or out ; ships, which 
carry one back to the days of Nelson and the East 
India Company, seem to abound ; there is the 
Bombay, for instance, that might have fought at 
Algeciras with Saumarez, or that might have con- 
veyed Clive to India. I suppose there are sailors 
who find the change in maritime life as marked at 







E 2 



Doivn Channel. 53 

St. ^Catherine's or Milwall as in the docks in the Isle 
of Dogs ; but, to my fancy, the transformation never 
seems more acute than when I emerge from one of 
the little dirty carriages which convey you from 
Fenchurch Street to Blackwall and look about me. 
Here, what is new is accentuated by what is old. 
Yonder, for example, is a fine, new Cape steamer, 
embodying everything that is most modern in the 
shape of engines, electric light, ice compartments, 
pumps of prodigious power, and the like, lying 
abreast of a warehouse that has received the com- 
modities of ships which were lifting frigate-like 
heights into the fog-thickened air of this part of the 
world when our gracious sovereign was a little girl 
playing upon the Ramsgate sands. The great 
docks down the river are new ; the ships which 
use them are in keeping. What should fit the 
colossal undertaking at Tilbury but the leviathans 
for which its giant repairing cradles are contrived ? 
One looks for nothing less than for structures of 
6000 tons after one has rounded out of Bugsby's 
Reach and is in the fairway for the Barking and 
Erith and Gravesend tracts. But there yet lingers 
a deal of homeliness in the shipping huddled within 
ken of the Tower and within bugle call of Shadwell 
and Limehouse and Deptford. It is even possible 
hereabouts to recast the panorama of the ages ; to 
note the old Margate hoy floating onwards, loaded 
with bilious holiday-makers ; to witness the stem- 
ming barge as Cooke painted her ; nay, even to 
view with the eye of retrospect some smart priva- 



54 The British Seas. 

teering schooner off Erith with her seasoned and 
determined company of men busily employed in 
taking in powder ready for Monsieur Woodenshoes, 
and especially for those straggling Dons who, like 
the stray silver spoons to the Irish footman, were 
peculiarly regarded as the picaroon's " perquisites." 

For a thorough enjoyment, however, of the smoky 
scenery and active interests of the river past London 
Bridge, one should carry to the contemplation of it 
a sort of dreaminess of observation. The impres- 
sions produced should have the kind of material 
vagueness, the unsubstantial massiveness as of 
mountainous clouds, so to speak, which the atmo- 
sphere of the great stream obliges the object it 
encloses to exhibit. To say that " yonder is Dept- 
ford ; " that " tJiere are the West India Docks ; " 
that " that place abreast is Woolwich ; " and so on, 
is to say nothing at all. Recollection can take no 
heed ; when everything is over the stern there is 
still little or nothing left to muse upon. The river 
scenery here must be surveyed in groups, and desig- 
nations are a species of impertinence. Let yonder 
concentrated forest of spars, gay with bunting, 
suffice. As we lean over the rail of our speeding 
ship there are begotten a hundred half-fancies, sen- 
sations, emotions, imaginations of an unfinished kind 
which individualization must annihilate. Campbell 
has expressed the fancy that possesses me : — 

There is a magnet-like attraction in 

These waters to the imaginative power 

That links the viewless with the visible, 

And pictures things unseen. To realms beyond 



Down Channel. 57 

Yon highway of the world my fancy flies, 
When by her tall and triple mast we know 
Some noble voyager that has to woo 
The trade winds and to stem th' ecliptic surge. 

The coral groves— the shores of conch and pearl, 
Where she will cast her anchor and reflect 
Her cabin-window lights on warmer waves, 
And under planets brighter than our own. 

The historic interests of the eastern reaches of the 
Thames stand high above those of all other rivers. 
The Mersey, with its spacious range of docks, is un- 
deniably more impressive, but there is a majesty in 
the memories of the Thames which enters like a 
seminal principle into the aspect of the renowned 
stream, and gives it a dignity not to be matched by 
rivers a thousand leagues long and shoreless to the 
eye that centres them. All about Erith and Graves- 
end is classic ground, if one may apply the word to 
this liquid highway. Here one beholds again with 
the gaze of fancy old Sebastian Cabot taking a fare- 
well of the gallant company of men under the com- 
mand of the lion-hearted Sir Hugh Willoughby ; 
here, again, one views that sumptuous little ship, 
the Daintie, bearing the banner of the renowned Sir 
Richard Hawkins at her masthead, sweeping stately 
through what was then most undoubtedly a surface 
of crystal, her quarters radiant with gilt, her stern 
flashful with glass, her sides of a toy-like grimness 
with the little grinning artillery of those days of 
brass popguns, her decks glittering with the many- 
coloured apparel of her shipmen and with the 
glancing of armour aft — for Sir Richard was one of 



58 The British Seas. 

those mariners who went to sea in a suit of mail. 
Here, too, one reconstructs the past in a vision of 
Mr. and Mrs. Henry Fielding aboard that terrible 
little Lisbon packet, whose master, the most insolent 
of sea-bears, was, to the universal delight of pos- 
terity, forced to go down upon his knees in the 
cabin and respectfully apologize to the great novelist. 
Who can see Gravesend without thinking of Field- 
ing — of the bowsprit of the little cod-smack shear- 
ing like the blast of a twenty-four pounder through 
the cabin window into the state-room where the 
novelist and his wife and others sat at breakfast ; of 
the sea-blessings which were heaped upon one 
another by the crews ; of poor Mrs. Fielding's miser- 
able toothache ; of the gout, the dropsy, the com- 
plicated anguish of the author of " Tom Jones," 
bound on a voyage that was to end only in killing 
him after causing the great spirit such sufferings as 
must grieve the most insensible, even in these late 
days, to read about ? 

Gravesend has been very happily termed the Sea 
Gate of London. One is sensible of the felicity of 
the expression as one sits at a waterside hotel- 
window and views the noble marine processions out- 
ward and inward bound. Gravesend is the great 
point of departure. You hardly seem to have said 
farewell to the old country whilst you are gliding 
down the Thames to the revolutions of a propeller or 
in the wake of a tug ; but once let the helm be star- 
boarded for The Hope, with the old town of Graves- 
end in a looming heap astern fast veering out of 




Q 

pq 



Doivn Channel. 61 

sight, and then, though you have the whole stretch 
of the English Channel before you to measure, yet 
the voyage seems to have really begun. You will 
presently be opening the deadly shoals to the north- 
ward of the Goodwins — the Sunk, the Long Sand — 
names which must needs sound sinisterly in the 
maritime ear for their tragic associations of ship- 
wreck, for their memorable traditions of human 
suffering and of magnificent courage. Yes ! Graves- 
end is truly the Sea Gate of London. For many a 
long hour in my time have I sat witnessing the scene 
of Thames water from the pier or from some other 
good point of view, never wearying of it, incessantly 
finding something stealing into view to catch and 
detain my eye at the moment when I was about to 
turn away. It is the huge ocean steamer fresh from 
an American port — some colossal National liner with 
sides of a scarred look from the blows of the 
tall Atlantic surge ; it is some outward-bound 
Peninsular and Oriental steamer smart with paint, 
with window-cleaning and brass-polishing, skipper 
and mates twinkling in buttons and lace like real 
Royal Naval men, the flutter of ladies' dresses, a 
black man cradled at the extremity of the awning 
holding a little flag. 

Somehow or other, leave-taking — tearful and 
choking as it must always be — seems to my mind to 
lack the profound significance it used to possess. 
What with an average speed of twelve knots an hour 
and what with the Suez Canal, the other side of the 
world is brought, so to speak, just round the corner. 



62 The British Seas. 

It is like saying good-bye to a man who is about to 
enter his brougham and whose house is at the other 
end of the town. But in my day there was distance 
at sea — the distance of time. This entered into 
one's good-byes and made them almost as solemn as 
a death-bed farewell. Four months to Australia ! 
three months' stay there, and four months for the 
homeward passage ! What was to happen in eleven 
months ? But now one talks of days. " I passed 
your house at Ramsgate," wrote a friend of mine, 
the captain of a large mail steamer, to me ; " it was 
half-past five o'clock in the morning, the blinds of 
your bedroom windows were down, and no doubt 
you were taking an off-shore cruise. We were doing 
a cool fourteen." Just so. His ship was doing a 
cool fourteen, and in some thirty days or so from 
that date all her passengers would be ashore at 
Dunedin or Otago, having measured the parallels of 
the two Atlantic Oceans, and every meridian from 
Agulhas to the distant Pacific coasts of the Maori. 
Thirty-four and thirty-five days to New Zealand ! 
One cannot weep very bitterly over a parting that 
is to interpose between us and those we love a piece 
of water so narrowed by time that even when the 
voyage is ended we still feel as though within hail of 
those left behind. 

Very different from " cool fourteens " was progress 
in my day — in the sixties, alas ! so fleetly works the 
Scythe, so remorseless is the run of the Sand ! I 
very well remember one of the ships I was aboard 
of occupying a whole fortnight in beating down 



Down Channel. 65 

Channel from the North Foreland to Plymouth 
Sound. Such endless goings about ! such distrac- 
tion of sea clamour ! Passengers groaning, every 
timber straining, every treenail with a shriek of its 
own, the pigs under the longboat filling the air with 
their lamentations, the water up to a man's waist in 
the scuppers, and the vessel herself always most 
abominably heeling over on one tack or the other, 
plunging viciously and going to leeward like a 
balloon under her bands of topsail with the yards 
fore and aft. I have a lively recollection of being in 
a hired troopship at the back of the Goodwin Sands 
through a long, roaring, black November night. 
The craft was a thousand-ton ship stuffed full with 
raw Irish recruits all deadly sick to the uttermost 
man. They lay helpless as logs of wood upon the 
deck, and the sailors, to come at the ropes, had to 
run over them. Every time the ship went about — ■ 
nearly every half-hour, I should think — the poor 
soldiers rolled like casks into the lee-scuppers, where 
they lay in a mass of floundering figures, too ill even 
to be profane. Figure this sort of thing with the 
Goodwin Sands close aboard, a night of ink so thick 
that a light had to be under your bow to see it, cold 
as Nova Zembla — for as Lord Nelson truly said, 
Deal and the Downs are the bleakest places in 
England — and the wind steadily growing from top- 
gallant breeze into a howling gale from the south- 
ward and westward. 

Not much of the coast scenery of the English 
Channel comes into sight in the run down, after the 

F 



66 The British Seas. 

tug has cast your ship adrift or your steamer has gone 
clear of Dungeness. The one who gets the best sight 
of the noble or tender or romantically ugly points of 
the coast must be the yachtsman ; after him, possibly, 
the coaster ; only that the crew of the collier, of the 
little butter-rigged trading schooner, of the barge, or 
indeed of any other of the craft whose business it is 
for the most part to keep the land aboard, are not 
commonly comprised of persons remarkable for 
their appreciation of nature. A little brig blowing 
leisurely along within cannon shot of the beach may 
be accepted as typical. If the old skipper in the tall 
hat directs his eyes at the land, it is not to admire 
the many beauties he may be abreast of, but to find 
out how fast he is going and what the shore has to 
tell him in the way of bearings. His old wife, sitting 
in the companion-way, continues to darn or knit for 
a whole watch together without diverting her gaze 
from her work, unless it is to fasten it upon her 
husband's pimpled and purple countenance. The 
fellow leaning in the doorway of the little caboose, 
smoking a pipe with its bowl inverted, is in all pro- 
bability meditating rather upon the sign of " The 
Three Thirsty Sailors " (with which house he is well 
acquainted) than upon the sparkling and pretty 
picture the town in which that tavern is situated 
presents in the crisp morning light as it lies directly 
in the wake of his sight. 

It must be the yachtsman, then, who knows the 
coast as it deserves to be known. He creeps from 
port to port in his bland and elegant little fabric of 



Down Channel. 67 

yawl or schooner. He is often becalmed for hours 
at a stretch opposite some spacious and gleaming 
terrace of cliff, or some low foreshore rising with 
twenty alternations of hues into a blue atmospheric 
perspective of hill. He has the leisure, and, as we 
may know by his literature, the taste to dwell with 
emotions of delight upon the scores of varying 
pictures which the progress of his little ship unrolls 
shorewards — a very tapestry of marine colour and 
subject. 

It must be admitted, however, that there is not 
much to look at after Gravesend has been dropped 
until you are abreast of Margate and rounding the 
bold point of North Foreland, when you have the 
whole stretch of Downs under your forefoot. The 
pictures from this point are numerous. Of Dover 
and Folkestone as towns there is little to be said — 
with enthusiasm at all events — when you are in them 
and surveying them as an assemblage of precipitous 
streets and level rows of houses ; but from the sea 
nothing shows more prettily along the whole line of 
seaboard down to Penzance. Much is owing to the 
magnificent domination of the marble-white heights 
of cliffs here. The dim land of France hovering in 
a cerulean mirage above the snow-like gleam at the 
extremity of the horizon, gives a startling significance 
to the majestic natural walls of Dover. It would 
seem as though nature had specially constructed this 
part of our island home with a view to the theories 
and ambitions of those gentry across the way whose 
forefathers kept many generations of British 

F 2 



68 The British Seas. 

Admirals riding in the Downs keenly on the look-out. 
The fall to the flat plains of Lydd is somewhat 
abrupt, as though all the chalk of the immediate 
district had been dedicated to Dover and Folkestone. 
Sandwich, perhaps, is a more lamentable instance of 
the effects of a retreating sea upon the hopes and 
prospects of men than Lydd ; yet next to Sandwich 
must, I think, stand Lydd as a melancholy example 
of the disastrous consequences of too much Ebb. 
There is not a more stranded place the wide world 
over. Compared with Lydd, Winchelsea is gay, 
giddy, and festive. Nevertheless, a man might own 
without reluctance to having lingered awhile upon 
the water off the miles of billowy shingle to gaze with 
mingled pleasure and astonishment at the vast 
surface of pebbles motionlessly counterfeiting the 
swell of the ocean, and brimming into a distance 
which there is little more to define than the 
dark square tower of the venerable church of Lydd. 
Man here submits himself to the imagination with 
something of the desolateness of the seabird. I 
figure the lighthouse people as dutiful but spiritless 
to a degree ; and the figure of the solitary coastguard 
might well pass as Robinson Crusoe masquerading 
in the costume of the preventive-man, and keeping 
an eager look-out for Friday, who is hourly expected 
in his canoe. 

Hastings viewed from the sea has but a formal 
and insipid appearance : I am speaking of it as a 
town. Despite its antiquity there is no glow of 
warmth, few or no suggestions of the shading of 




pq 



Down Channel. yi 

time in the exterior it submits to the seawardly eye.. 
St. Leonards, in a structural sense, is also defective 
in qualities of boldness and tint. More must go to 
the production of picturesque effects than bay- 
windows and houses of four or five stories. The 
Marina is an agreeable lounge, and after the bleak- 
ness of the Forelands district the temperature here 
might be accepted as quite West Indian. The 
sovereignty of the demon of flatness, whose cradle 
and whose home must surely be Romney Marsh, 
abruptly ends before Hastings heaves into view. 
The land is now hilly and swelling, with here and 
there features which come very near to being grand 
in their way. Fairlight Down is indeed a regal 
eminence, and an object of commanding interest and 
beauty viewed from the sea. 

Eastbourne has the distinctive merit of Beachy 
Head. This triumphant rampart of chalk and cliff 
rising to a height of nealy six hundred feet, makes 
handsome atonement for the defects of the land 
about Hythe and Dungeness. One finds another 
suggestion of nature's anxiety that Britannia should 
sentinel herself, in this noble rise of cliff. By this 
time the Channel has made a wide stretch. The 
coast of France is seventy miles distant, and, there- 
fore, the giant on the look-out hereabouts must be a 
head and shoulders taller than the Colossus whose 
eye is upon the Dover Straits. What is to be said 
of the Sussex shore from Seaford to Selsea Bill ? 
Brighton is between, and Newhaven, that dirtiest of 
little towns, whose utter and entire dismalness not 



72 The British Seas. 

even the memory of " Mr. Smith," nor yet a slash- 
ing wet day, can deepen. Supposing ourselves on 
board ship, however, these are places of which we 
shall not obtain a glimpse. It would certainly not 
be worth a shift of the helm to survey the front of 
Brighton town. One must look very close here for 
what is picturesque, and then, perhaps, after peer- 
ing narrowly, find little that is effective outside some 
old wherry bilged in a shaggy nook of cliff. It is 
noteworthy that in this country the most popular 
" resorts," as they are called, are the least pleasantly 
situated of all the considerable towns and cities of 
the realm. Could anything be more flat and iriste 
than the Isle of Thanet ? No resolution to make 
the best of what cannot be helped can manufacture 
a romantic or engaging vicinity for Dover and 
Folkestone. Had George IV. occupied fifty years 
in making a choice, he could not have selected a 
more barren and inhospitable neighbourhood for 
that Brighton which we may take it his presence and 
his patronage created out of the Brighthelmstone of 
an earlier period. 



CHAPTER IV 
down channel (continued). 

Isle of Wight — Cowes — Shipping in the Solent — Bournemouth 
— Weymouth and Bridport — Torquay — Plymouth and its 
Sound and scenery — Falmouth from Pendennis Castle — 
Penzance — Mount's Bay— Newlyn — Cardiff, its docks and 
streets. 

In the warm months one is readily advised of one's 
approach to the Isle of Wight by the white canvas 
of yachts hovering in the blue distance like wings 
of gossamer. They are the butterflies of the deep, 
announcing that summer is at hand or has arrived. 
There is something wonderfully proud, yet tender, 
too, in the aspect of the southern majestic terraces 
of the Isle of Wight. From the summit of St. 
Catherine's Hill you command an elevation of hard 
upon eight hundred and fifty feet, as though the 
coast of France, more distant yet from this point, 
must be proportionately watched by some Eye of 
Old England, whose giant owner here has stepped a 
pace from the mainland and stands, knee-deep and 
isolated, gazing. 

It is impossible to imagine a set of pictures more 
delicate than those the interior of this little gem 



TJu I 

of Channel land offers to the gaze that centre- 
Cowes, divided by its rippling stream of river. I do 
regard as the sweetest, toy-like, most charming, 
memory-haunting spot in Great Britain. All is 
garden-like and of an exquisite refinement. I seem 
to find such airy delicacy of atmospheric effect, of 
floating fabric, of rooted structure ashore all about 
this little bit of island coast as is nowhere else to be 
matched — indeed, I ma; 5 is nowhere else to 

be witnessed. The impression left is that of having 
surveyed a mass of fairy-like work wrought in ivory. 
There is a suggestion of littleness here of an especial 
sort of choiceness. with the grace of a dainty pris- 
matic radiance over all ; the Solent and Spithead 
are litt. the shipping is little, by which I 

mean the shipping that is proper to the island — the 
yachts ; the sheer hulks of old line-of-battle ships do 
but seem to accentuate with their clumsy looming 
forms the charm of minuteness. Heave your ship 
to off Ryde, and look at the little town: it has 
the appearance of a toy-town incomparably well 
finished : it produces the same sort of fancy you get 
at Table Bay. where, though the houses be of the 
average size, even- dwelling is dwarfed into elf-like 
dimensions by the towering mass of Table Moun- 
tain, at . whose gigantic foot from a distance the 
white dwelling-places appear to nestle. The adja- 
cency of Portsmouth and of the Southampton 
Docks higher up supplies these waters with the 
most composite of imaginable sea-pictures, for here 
may be seen the British vacht, the British merchant 



Down Channel. 77 

man, and the British man-of-war, in the highest 
form of development. Our maritime domination is 
nowhere better suggested. The crimson cross is 
much, but it is the red commercial flag that makes 
it everything, and, as though a detail were yet 
wanted for the completion of the represented sea 
interests of these dominions, there is the gay bunt- 
ing of the pleasure craft always at hand. As some 
massive leviathan metal structure with five masts 
and two funnels, with here and there a dot of red, 
where a marine keeps guard, and some admiral's 
flag at the fore or mizzen floats into the field of 
sunny waters, a noble ocean steamer, fresh from 
Southampton Docks, bound to the United States, to 
the Cape, to the West Indies, her decks full of 
passengers, her appearance out and away more 
graceful and but a very little less imposing than that 
of the armour-clad, speeds under the warship's stern 
for the Solent faster than a gale of wind could blow 
a clipper ship along ; hard by, glancing through the 
satin-like surface, is a schooner yacht, her canvas of 
a milk-white softness, her figure-head burning like a 
golden star, her glossy black sides trembling back 
the glory lifting off into them from the sun-touched 
waters, through which her keen stem is ripping as a 
knife shears through silk. These are but types; 
figure, then, the assemblage of scores of them with 
fifty variations of build, of rig, of dimensions — the 
torpedo boat, the old collier, a lustrous royal yacht 
some North German Lloyd craft, all windows and 
wings of steam ! The catalogue cannot be con- 



78 The British Seas. 

tinued, but the spectacle is something to live for 
ever in the memory. 

The woods and hills of Bournemouth make a 
pleasant picture of the town. No nobler expanse of 
water could be asked for than the great bay that lies 
within the embrace of Hengistbury Head and 
Ballard Down. The climate of this place is a note- 
worthy feature, but much too much stress, I think, 
is laid upon what is termed " the advantage of the 
odour of the pine-woods." Few people have suffered 
more from rheumatism than I, and I do not scruple 
to pronounce pine entirely worthless as a remedial 
agent for this disease, whether in the form of 
" odours," or in the more defined shape of turpentine 
or terebene. But, nevertheless, Bournemouth may 
be honestly termed the best place to reside in, during 
winter, on the coast. It is not incessantly raining 
there, as at Plymouth ; the wind rarely blows with 
an edge ; yet Bournemouth combines with a pleasant 
temperature an elevation that lifts its population 
above all risk of the obnoxious exhalations of flat 
lands and their inevitable marshes. 

But we must needs be in a little ship to witness 
this scenery. Assuming ourselves to be towing down 
Channel, or aboard some big ocean steamer out of 
the Thames, we shall most certainly see nothing of 
Bournemouth, nor of the rest of the line of coast 
that forms the western frame of the extensive bight 
down to Durlston Point. Indeed, Portland High 
Light is about as much as we may expect to behold 
by night, whilst by day there is nothing to look at, 




>, 

a 



Down Channel. 81 

unless it be a mere film or blob of land, faint as a 
fancy, in the remote distance. But aboard a coaster 
or a yacht we are at liberty to crawl pleasantly 
around, past Swanage and St. Alban's Head into 
that large and pleasant bay in which Weymouth is 
situated. The coast has a fine curve here, and 
though low and flat to the north, rises at Jordan 



\ /ft 




bft „./. . 




Off Looe Island. By Henry Moore, R.A. 

Hill to a height of a hundred and sixty feet, with an 
eastern trend of picturesque cliff, broken and rugged 
with steep ravines. 

The eye is impressed by the abrupt rises and falls 
of the land hereabouts. The best charm, perhaps, of 
Weymouth lies in its extrinsic qualities of agreeable 
country. What the local guide-book would call 
" walks," are very numerous. There are some solid 
antiquarian interests also ; the Well of Rodwell, for 

G 



82 The British Seas. 

instance, Sandsfoot Castle, one of the defences of 
Henry VIII., and contemporaneous with the well- 
known castles at Walmer, Deal, and Sandown. In 
the churchyard at Wyke Regis lie the remains of 
eighty of the people who were drowned in the 
wreck of the Abergavenny m 1805. The loss of this 
fine Indiaman is one of the most memorable in the 
marine annals. The tradition is preserved fresh and 
green to this hour, and I have somewhere read — 
though I cannot quote my authority — that in calm 
weather, when the water is clear, the remains of the 
wreck are visible. 

The beauties of the coast thicken and grow richer 
as you proceed on your westerly course. Bridport : 
a volume might be filled with descriptions of this 
district only. There are twenty features of positive 
magnificence betwixt Rotherwood and Eggardon 
Hill and Lewesdon alone. Then there is the quaint 
little town of Charmouth, an ancient Roman station, 
and a free borough so long ago as 1320. It is a 
very garden viewed from Catherstone. Sailing past 
Exmouth — Devonian to the core in scenic beauty — 
past little Seaton and Sidmouth, whose harbour, like 
others along this line of channel coast, is filled with 
sand and rendered useless without hope from the 
dredger,and Exmouth, with its shelter of Withycombe 
and Woodbury Hills, and Dawlish, one of the most 
lovely of the gems which jewel this sea-washed line of 
land, and Teignmouth, that, to be viewed aright, 
should be beheld when the sun is low in the west, 
and when the air is crimson with the expiring beam 



Doiun Channel. 85 

— we heave our little ship to off Torquay, and spend 
a long hour in leaning over the side, admiring as 
perfect a piece of Channel scenery as mortal eye 
could wish to rest on. 

The town is a crowd of villages built upon hilly 
ground exquisitely vivid with perennial growth. 
The guide-books shock the idealistic memories which 
one carries away from this place by irreverent talk of 
imports, of harbour dues, and other vulgarities of 
the commercial life. This is very well when one has 
to deal with Southampton, with its fine docks, even 
with little, grimy Newhaven and its excellent break- 
water ; but the very name of statistics sounds upon 
the ear as a sort of violence done to such a fairy-like 
spot as Torquay. 

But we must push on, and with a glance only at 
that opening in the coast which would admit us to 
the spectacle of the beauties of Dartmouth, we head 
for Plymouth Sound, and let go our anchor for a 
little spell inside the Breakwater. My last recollec- 
tion of Plymouth is of a night-time of glorious moon- 
shine. The planet stood high over the Sound, and 
amidst the pear-like haze in which the atmosphere 
lay steeping there sparkled the powerful light of the 
Eddystone, the gleams on the Catwater side, and a 
little hovering constellation of the riding light of 
ships. In the heart of the tremulous, greenish, 
silver wake of the moon lay the massive, motionless 
shapes of two ironclads. The hush of the night was 
upon the scene. I could not distinguish the faintest 
creeping noise of surf. At intervals some clock 



86 The British Seas. 

ashore would strike and set a number of bells 
tinkling in the Sound, but seawards the repose was 
grave-like, without anything to vex it in the subdued 
hum of life floating up to the Hoe, on whose summit 
I stood, out of Plymouth town. 

Whoever has visited Sydney will witness in 
Plymouth and its stretch of waters and adjacent 
shores a copy of the noble Australian bay in little. 
Drake's ' Island floats like an emerald in quick- 
silver ; the greenery of Mount Edgcumbe, with the 
bright and vivid spaces of sward, falls to the very 
wash of the water, where it sips the salt. Penlee 
Point makes a dark and massive object beyond. 
Eastward the point is crowned by the green and 
reddish heights of Staddon and Batten Castle. 
The scene of Catwater, to as far as Laira Bridge, 
has a beauty beyond the power of the pen to 
express. The space of green beach, the smacks 
hauled up for repair, some old hulk perhaps to be 
broken up, a group of quaint cottages, far away 
the dark blue of the Dartmoor Hills and ranges 
of limestone cliffs, extravagantly quarried ; here is 
such a combination as the brush of the artist could 
alone convey. From where our little imaginary 
ship is lying we see the grass-clad Hoe surmounted 
by handsome houses, the spires of churches rising 
past them, and a foreground of ironclads, smacks, 
full-rigged ships, and ocean steamers, not to men- 
tion the little training-brigs, which no nautical eye 
can view without delight as a memorial of the 
days when ships of the State truly walked the 



Down Channel. 89 

waters like things of life, when their vitality was 
that of the wind and their grace that of the sea-bird. 

Even the Scotch mists which are very unpleasantly 
common here will communicate a new element of 
beauty to the Sound by the mere effect of revela- 
tion. The smother comes rolling down out of a 
clear blue sky, and very wetting and intensely dis- 
agreeable it is whilst it lasts, but its gradual clear- 
ance is a succession of noble hints. Massive green 
and reddish heights seem to shoulder their legal 
proportions out of the thickness ; the ships ooze 
out one by one ; a windy flash of pale sunshine 
trembles upon some steel-blue space of water ; 
then the azure heavens open to the horizon, and 
all Plymouth and her Sound lie radiant and laugh- 
ing before you. 

Falmouth, too, is another of our west-coast ports 
whose hundred beauties beggar description. Quit 
your little ship and make for Pendennis Castle, 
and from that vantage-ground survey the scene, 
and you must own, I think, that there is nothing 
fairer to be witnessed in all England. It is the 
same whether surveyed from lofty summit or from 
low foreshore. The summer fields, bearing their 
yellow harvest, slope in shining billows of gold 
to the dark blue water. The crystal surface of the 
creek mirrors the white cottage or the leaning tree 
with the delicate glory of reflection that you 
notice in an image shining upon a soap-bubble. 
Afar the tall hills swell in splendour under the sun, 
and blend with the distant azure till their sky- 



90 



The British Seas. 



lines become an illusion, and one knows not where 
the earth ends and the firmament begins. Near to 
where your anchor has taken the ground rises the 
Black Rock; on the port side is St. Anthony's 
Point, rearing a cream-coloured lighthouse, and 
clothed with the rich foliage that is everywhere 




The Armed Knight Rock.?Land's End. By A. Ditchfield. 



superabundant. In the Carrick Roads are a number 
of craft, some of them very large ships ; every 
vessel flies a colour, and every colour has its tint 
mirrored in the still water upon which the vessels 
lie as though bedded in a sheet of glass. 

But one must quit the deck for the shore to 
obtain anything resembling a satisfying view of 



Down Channel. 91 

Falmouth. Pendennis Castle gives you the com- 
mand of vision you need. In the north-west the 
land is covered with houses ; roofs glow and 
windows sparkle ; the inner harbour is gay with 
little shipping, with yachts and small steamers ; 
the Helston Hills are beyond, and far away stand 
the phantom Carnmarth Hills. From the beach of 
Gyllyng Vaese to the distant Manacle Rock the eye 
follows the bright green land as it slopes to the 
dark crag and the brown sand. To the right of 
you are wide stretches of fields flanked by the glit- 
tering brows of the St. Austell Hills, with a sight of 
St. Mawes' Creek and its little nestling village, and 
further away, past Carrick Point, is the Dodman. 

Meanwhile the atmosphere is sweet with the aroma 
of a luxuriant vegetation. The perfume of the exotic 
plant and of the wild flower is in it, for here is a 
country where the melon needs no hothouse. The 
wild strawberry grows side by side with the wild 
rose ; it is the land of plenty, and particularly of 
clotted cream. 

There is an absence of all conventionalism at 
Falmouth and about its district that is soothing and 
refreshing in the highest degree. Its moral atmo- 
sphere seems tempered by the drab-coloured qualities 
of the many members of the Society of Friends who 
dwell here. It is somewhat strange that so much 
loveliness of seaboard as we find in this part should 
be without houses. Is it too far distant for the rich 
yachtsmen ? There are creeks which are like 
glimpses of Paradise. In these land-locked waters 



92 The British Seas. 

it is conceivable that there should reign a perpetual 
summer. And he who has explored the River Fal 
has knowledge of as much fairy-like loveliness of 
scenery as any portion of this habitable globe has to 
submit to his gaze. 

Penzance is an exceedingly quaint little town. It 
opens upon you as you round into Mount's Bay, and 
is like a finishing touch to the impressions you have 
received from the magnificent scenery of the Devon 
and Cornwall coasts down to this point. I am not 
sure that the run by rail is not more prodigal in its 
yield of memories of beauty than the coastwise trip ; 
for ashore, as you travel along, it is one moment 
some river shining with summer glory, then league- 
long stretches of blue moorland closing upon green 
and yellow distances, then a little sheet-like space of 
lake or arm of water mirroring perhaps a boat half 
full of people indolently rowing ; then a sudden rent 
in the green land, with a glad disclosure of bright 
blue sea beyond ; and always the locomotive is wind- 
ing you through acres of swelling, tree-covered land, 
past noble bays and dark and frowning cliffs, with 
here and there a sight of some wharf, at which a 
little cluster of colliers are swinging their cargoes in 
and out. The scene from the esplanade at Penzance 
must, I think, be held out and away more romantic 
than when the picture is viewed from the water. 
This, to be sure, is a matter of opinion ; I write from 
my own impressions. I have come ashore and stood 
looking seawards, and found myself charmed to a 
degree I was certainly insensible of when aboard. 



Down Channel. 95 

The hills, rich in vegetation, which back the town, 
make a fine setting for the houses. The little island 
called St. Michael's Mount, with its stronghold of a 
house on top of it, is rendered a very delicate 
creation by distance. As you look out upon the 
ocean there are the lofty Marazion Hills upon your 
left ; the town of Marazion lies in a white huddle at 
the eastern foot of the range, and the dark blue of 
Cudden Point goes stealing and melting into the 
silver azure of the Lizard district. To the right of 
you the coast shows in green, and gold, and yellow, 
and down upon it, not very far distant from Pen- 
zance, are clustered the singular structures of little 
Newlyn, with the odder and quainter Mouse Hole 
further on. 

I have a very clear recollection of Newlyn. 
Viewed from afar it is a really exquisite picture, with 
its grey-white structures standing out upon the 
background of softly shadowed, wooded slopes. It 
might belong to the sixteenth century in respect of 
modern scientific appointments. It knows nothing 
of drainage ; it is without gas and without pave- 
ments. When I was at Newlyn it had a population 
of between 3000 and 4000 people, the males of whom 
were principally employed in the mackerel and 
pilchard fisheries. As mere sights one should be 
very well satisfied to have seen Penzance and New- 
lyn In the summer-time the hills and the district 
round about, rich in the beauties of the harvest, are 
a perpetual feast to the eye. There is no magic in 
ink to reproduce the colours, the shadows, the play 



96 The British Seas. 

of light, the effects of the moonbeam in this part of 
the English coast. Cornwall, I think, must be the 
despair of the painter in prose. One can only look 
and dream ; the most eloquent expression of one's 
sensations must prove but the most flippant imper- 
tinence in the face of the truth. 

Taking Cardiff as our final port, I own it is not 
without pleasure that I find it time to shift my helm 
for the prosaics of that remarkable town of docks. 
The mind, almost wearied with romantic splendour 
of the coast, long after that point has been rounded 
where old England, in the name of the Land's End, 
expire's in a final effort of two or three rocks, turns 
with honest hope of refreshment to a part of the 
British foreshore that is without grace, and whose 
interests are entirely human. Whoever is ac- 
quainted with Cardiff can talk with melancholy 
conviction of one immensely long street, which, of a 
Saturday night, is crowded in parts almost to suffo- 
cation by processions of every species of human 
being, whose legs remain unwearied even after 
midnight has struck. Here may possibly be en- 
countered representatives of all the Jacks in the 
world, from China to Peru. Humanly speaking, 
then, Cardiff is of some interest ; otherwise, there 
is but little of it that the memory will much care to 
preserve. It is true that St. John's is a fine old 
church, and the castle has been made a very won- 
derful interior of by Lord Bute, whose father, in 
creating the docks, created Cardiff. But one must 
go to those same docks to be entertained. There is 



Down Channel. 99 

no scenery within the reach of a walk round about 
Cardiff; all is business and hurry. It is not hills 
and lakes, crystal rivers and enamel'd meads, but 
ironmasters and coalfactors, shipowners and ship- 
brokers, timber merchants and attorneys. Sup- 
posing one's little ship to have been docked, a walk 
to the end of the pier will enable one to obtain a 
view of the place. The scene is extraordinarily full 
of vitality. The eye bends carelessly upon the 
Somersetshire coast looming somewhat vaguely 
across the grey sea ; upon the brown heaps of the 
Flat Holms, and the Steep Holms, and Bream's 
Down, and upon the towering acclivity of Penarth 
Head, from whose church you may look forth, from 
an elevation of about two hundred and fifty feet 
above the ocean line, upon the distant Welsh hills, 
where the valley of the Taff divides Garth Moun- 
tain from Caerphilly. But when the gaze comes to 
the docks the attention is promptly arrested. You 
witness a vast forest of masts, and yards, and 
funnels, intricate as a cobweb with the complexities 
of standing and running rigging, and gaudy with the 
flags of all nations. Tugs are plying, dredgers are 
working, sailors are chorussing, locomotives puffing, 
and the offshore wind is charged with odours of the 
produce of the world. It is to pass from the 
romance of nature to the romance of human in- 
dustry to arrive at such a scene as this after the line 
of coast we have been glancing at as we came along. 
There are some noble passages of district in the 
shores which form the Bristol Channel, and from 

h 2 



ioo The British Seas. 

St. David's Head, or, say, from Milford Haven, to 
Barry Island, there is much to be seen to deepen the 
delights of a summer cruise. But it dwells most 
upon the memory as a foreshore of business. It is 
not easy to dissociate it from Swansea, with its 
docks ; from this same Cardiff at which we have 
halted ; from Newport, that infant giant of a place, 
and from those gates of the Avon — Portishead, and 
the Avonmouth Dock. But enough has been said. 
To proceed now would be to land us in a very waste 
of dock statistics, than which I should say there is 
nothing, unless it be the Tonnage Question, more 
profoundly uninteresting. 




CHAPTER V. 

THE WIGHT AND THE SOLENT SEA. 

Southampton Water in the early part of the 
yachting season, before the cruisers have gone to sea 
and the western regattas have attracted the racing 
fleet to the sailing matches in other ports, presents an 
aspect grateful especially to the yachtsman, but 
which cannot fail to make glad every heart that loves 
the sea. The craft have been hibernating like the 
chrysalis throughout the colder months. Stript of 
every rope and spar, they have lain on the mud of 
the Itchen shore, or at Gosport, where their denuded 
masts show in the winter like a thicket of dead tree- 
stumps. It is now July, and, like the butterfly, they 
appear in all their proper garb to sport in their own 
element. As the ebb-tide runs swiftly past, they 
seem to strain on their anchors as if they would be 
free to go with it to the open sea, and there frisk and 
frolic with their old playmates, the wild sea-waves. 
The hull that spent the winter high and dry on the 
cold, cheerless shore, now new-blacked, sits pleasantly 
on the stream. The varnish no longer disfigures the 
deck, which shows an immaculate white. Figure- 
heads and brasses glisten like precious metal in the 
sun's rays, and the slender topmasts slowly wave to 



: : : The British S. 

the summer breeze as the boats rock gently on the 
water- 
It is a graceful sight, this fleet of yachts lying 

■.-. ■-.--.-:■. ^ ::;:;:. ir. i Hnr.r Tiers - = '.'. .- 15 
can with room to swir.^ Here are steam 
whose burthen would suggest a commercial employ- 
ment, but whose real use is declared by their graceful 
lines and man-of-war smartr. 5c me of them are 

known in the Spanish main and beneath the South- 
r~ I:.-- : -.:_ -:':::: .".-:-:- ::.-.:. ire. it. i ;• : .f 

ir. i : ::-.:- ::::/. :::/-. :--.-"..: -. . : :-. :r.r ;.:::." ^ 
many seasons, though they look as fresh as had 

but lately parted company with the stocks. Here also 
are bold little cutters, in which the landsman will 
tell you that you could not " swing a cat," but on 
■;.:::. Tn::::;h :.::.'-::: --.-:. rz. r r. hive •■vri:hrrri 
many a gale in the Channel and the " Bay." and are 
ready if needs be to do so again. Here are some of 
v.:.:: .:.:- . :' t : -: r: :.z_ --. . - - ihihrz.zziz.z : : ..- 
zzris ::h :* nr.:z.i:L± r.-v - .;.'.: .:- r : zz.:r.rz. 

but of which much is spoken and much is hoped, 
:*:: :h -_ itsiin.-r: z.if -.:.'::: - :-:-. : h:= in z: r. :hrzz. 
under a commission from an aspirant to racing 
honours, who will be content with any cost provided 
his vessel cannot be beaten. Here lies, the cynosure 
of ah cutter which before many days will sail 

bravely across the N : nh Atlantic sea to make a bold 
endeavour to bring home again the Cup won by the 
America, and since so jealously guarded by the 
centre-boar: which show no desire to come 

h::hr: :' : :z. .:-.-. Frizz. vi:h: : vizh: zz.z :r rr. 



The Wight and the Solent Sea. 105 

the fleet to the shore, steam launches, gigs, cutters, 
and dingeys, are busily plying, for greetings have to 
be exchanged amongst those who meet here annually, 
and stores brought aboard. The afternoon train also 
has brought down owners released from business or 
from pleasures not less wearying, and guests fortu- 
nate in the prospect before them, fortunate in friend- 
ship which will stand the severest test known in 
social intercourse, a lengthened sojourn in the close 
companionship of a yachting cruise. 

When evening falls, the tall spars look taller in 
the growing gloom, burgees are hauled down, and 
anchor lights begin to show in the deepening twilight. 
Down the water those of Calshot brightly gleam. 
The north-western sky, in the direction of the Test's 
mouth, where in old days the great logs of trees 
felled in the forest used to lie awaiting towage to 
Portsmouth, gives promise of sailors' weather. A 
little later, the yachts' fairy lights are all aglow in a 
grove of masts and shrouds but dimly seen. Cheery 
sounds of mirth are carried over the water from many 
a deck. From a distant schooner, a girl's sweet 
voice comes blended with the notes of her guitar. 
From the forecastle of a nearer vessel is heard the 
muffled music of a band such as only perforins in a 
yacht's forecastle. The crew have leave to make 
merry to-night in their boyish, delightful way, for to- 
morrow they sail. They will drop down the water 
with the morning's ebb, to seek the open sea beyond 
the Needles, and then to go wherever pleasure may 
lead. 



io6 The British Seas. 

It is a time for reverie. Perhaps the mind will 
travel back to the days when this scene of present 
peace and pleasure knew bloodshed, rapine, and 
war. It must have been somewhere near the present 
site of the Docks, that Canute, after the capture by 
storm of the old town, had his regal chair brought 
down to the edge of the Trianton, to prove in a 
practical manner that he really could not control the 
ebb and flow, whatever might be the view of his 
sycophant courtiers as to his power in that direction. 
One wonders whether he himself was not a little 
more disappointed, when his ancles were moistened 
by the disobedient flood, than the histories of our 
youth would make us believe. It certainly indicated 
some degree of chagrin to refuse to wear his crown, 
and to send it "to be set upon Christ's head at 
Winchester." Old Hanton town, which Canute and 
his Danes captured, was sacked in the wars of 
Edward the Third's reign by a party of marauders 
from Genoa. Stow gives a quaint narrative of this 
event : — 

"The fourth of October, fiftie galleys, well manned and 
furnished, came to Southampton about nine o'clock, and sacked 
the tovvne, the townsmen running away for feare ; by the breake 
of the next day, they which fled, by the help of the countrie 
thereabout came against the pyrates and fought with them, in 
the which skirmish there were slaine to the number of three 
hundred pyrates, together with their captaine, the King of 
Italie's sonne. To this young man the French king had given 
whatsoever he got in the kingdome of England, but he being 
beaten down, cried ' rancow ; ' notwithstanding, the husbandman 
laid on him with his clubbe until he had slaine him, speaking 
these words : ' Yea,' (quoth he), ' I know full well thou art a 
Francon, and therefore shalt thou dye. 5 For he understood not 
his speech, neither had any skill to take gentlemen prisoners 




**& 


'■1 


$J 




ft 


1 

1 




The Wight and the Solent Sea. 109 

and to keepe them for their ransomme. Therefore the residue 
of these gennevvayes, after they had set the town on fire and 
burnt it up quite, spedde to their galleys, and in their flying 
some of them were drowned, and after this the inhabitants of 
the towne compassed it about with a greate wall." 

Considerable parts of this "greate wall " are still 
to be seen, buried for the most part (the Bar Gate is 
a notable exception) in the slums of the modern town. 
There was, until quite recently, a good view from 
the water of the fine old Bridewell fortress ; but that 
has been interrupted by the interposition of a ware- 
house, which no doubt may prove commercially 
useful, but is not a satisfactory substitute for the 
picturesque remains which it hides. 

Southampton is indebted for its popularity as a 
yachting centre to the proximity of the Isle of Wight. 
Indeed, to all ports of the Solent, that famous isle 
has always been " et decus et presidium," since the 
far-off days when the Phoenician mariners, and, 
after them, the Grecian galleys and ships of Armorica, 
brought thither the merchandise of the Mediterranean 
to exchange it for the tin of the Cornish mines. At 
a later time, Drayton thus sings its praises : — 

" Of all the southern isles, the first in Britain's grace, 
For none of he accompt so neare her bosom stand, 
'Twixt Penwith's furthest point and Goodwin's quechy sand ; 
Both for her seat and soyle that's farre before another, 
Most justly she accounts Great Britain for her mother." ! 

And in our time the Wight has secured the 
warmest admiration of Sir Walter Scott, who has 
left on record the impression it made upon a mind 
1 '• Polyolbion." Song ii. 



1 1 o The British Seas. 

pre-eminently appreciative of lovely scenes in his 
description of it in the " Surgeon's Daughter : " — 
" That beautiful island, which who once sees never 
forgets, through whatever part of the world his future 
path may lead him." To one sailing from South- 
ampton to Cowes, when abreast of the Calshot Spit, 
a comprehensive view is presented of so much of the 
Wight as is washed by the Solent Sea. Seen from 
this point the general character of the island is flat, 
but the Southern Downs rise high in the blue 
distance to relieve a landscape otherwise tame. For 
it must be confessed that the point just suggested as 
one from which the island should be viewed, is 
recommended by the extent rather than the beauty 
of the scene displayed. The "fair isle" is always 
fair, but to appreciate its majestic aspects you bear 
away to sea beyond Hurst Castle and the Needles. 
Not yet, however, for you will have caught a distant 
glimpse of the Roads of Cowes, sufficient to compel 
a nearer view. The Roads are occupied by a fleet of 
yachts, such as nowhere else in the wide world 
assembles. Great steamers, which it is hard to 
believe serve the luxurious but wholesome pleasures 
of individuals. Sailing yachts of every size and rig, 
designed some for racing speed, others for the ocean 
voyage, gay with bright and varied bunting, amongst 
which is predominant the white ensign (which the 
vessels of the Yacht Squadron alone are privileged to 
fly), here cluster round the great hull of the ship of 
war, whose presence amongst the graceful craft that 
fill the Roads, indicates the near neighbourhood of 



The Wight and the Solent Sea. 113 

the monarch herself. The " yellow leopards of 
England," extended by the breeze from the main of 
one of the royal yachts, proclaims that there is a 
prince aboard who loves the sea as Britannia's princes 
should. Time was when Cowes was a commercial 
port of importance, and as such knew palmy days. 
A brisk trade with the American plantations in their 
early age was here maintained. At a later period, 
good profit was made in provisioning the ships of 
war, and large fleets of merchantmen would lie off 
the Medina, waiting for the wind to take them down 
Channel or for the convoy promised from Portsmouth. 
Those days are gone, but Cowes is famous still, for it 
is par excellence the place of tryst and tournament for 
yachts, and the Yacht Squadron, if it be proud and 
exclusive, is the chief of yacht clubs. The Club 
occupies the old blockhouse fort, on the west of the 
Medina, which was built in the reign of Henry VIII. 
Another, similar, stood upon the eastern point, which 
has long since disappeared. These were deemed 
very formidable in their day, and Leland said of 
them that they were wont to " roar in great thunder 
where Newport enters stately Wight." ! 

To-day we see Cowes at its best and brightest, for 
it is the morning of a great event — a race for a 
Queen's Cup. The rising sun saw the crews busily 
at work upon the racing craft, weighing anchors and 
stowing them below, sending ashore gigs and 
dingeys laden with spare spars and cabin tables. 
Sails have been uncoated and set with anxious care 
1 Leland, " Cygnea Cantio," v. 560. 



H4 The British Seas, 

— one reef earing rove in the expectation of a breeze 
likely to freshen as the day grows older. For 
though it has been a morning of dazzling bright- 
ness, occasional catspaws now fitfully ruffle the 
water, and sundogs stream down from the fleecy 
clouds, and there are other signs of wind not lost 
on the wary skipper. At present there is just 
enough to stretch the wings of the competing ships, 
some of which are already reaching on and off in 
the neighbourhood of the mark-boat, awaiting the 
signal to prepare, the sails meanwhile being criti- 
cally watched by the mate, who directs from time to 
time yet another pull on the halyard or sheet. As 
the time appointed for the start approaches, the 
racing fleet gathers closer, the vessels now running 
before the wind with sheets pinned to ease the 
pace, now gibing, now wending. The premonitory 
gun is heard, and each skipper is intent upon the 
other's movements, striving for the weather gauge 
and place of vantage. Two vessels are luffing 
with this design, and another, sailing obliquely 
too near the line, is observed from the castle to 
have passed it. With grief and chagrin she sees 
her recall numeral hoisted and pays dearly for 
her rashness. Ere she can come about and take 
a station behind the line the signal is fired for the 
start. Her competitors are away like hounds from 
the leash, and have left her at a disadvantage which 
good fortune and good seamanship will with diffi- 
culty retrieve. The latter may do much in this earlier 
part of the race, for it is a dead beat to the wind- 




I 2 



The Wight and the Solent Sea. 1 1 7 

ward and Lymington Spit. This is not- regretted 
by those who, like ourselves, are following the fast 
racers on vessels less fleet in the wind. The tide 
serving, all work the island shore past Egypt Point. 
To the west, beyond this point, is Gurnet Bay, 
between which and the mainland opposite at Leap, 
there is said to have existed in very old times 
(that is to say where history and fable blend, so 
that it is impossible to separate them), a dry, or at 
any rate, a fordable connection. An obscure passage 
in Diodorus Siculus, whose information with regard 
to the geography of Britain was probably both 
scanty and vague, is responsible for a good deal 
of bold speculation and heated controversy upon 
the subject of Victis having been an isthmus at a 
period within the range of tradition. That a branch 
from one of the Roman highways led to the Hamp- 
shire shore at Leap is pretty well established. 
That the tin was conveyed to the coast by this 
road is probable enough ; that it was conveyed to 
the Isle of Wight is certain, for it has been found 
in considerable quantities along the line of the 
old Roman road, which ran from Gurnett Bay 
through Newport to Puckaster. If there is any- 
thing in etymology, we may safely conjecture that 
Stansore Point was that of the departure of the 
tin from the mainland. After all this it remains 
an open question whether it was carried by boat 
or not, and that with a strong bias of probability 
in favour of the boat. Bede thus states what he 
had heard of the Isle of Wight : — " It is situate 



1 1 8 The British Seas. 

opposite the division of the South Saxons and the 
Gewissge, being separate from it by a sea, three 
miles over, called the Solente. In this narrow 
sea, the two sides of the ocean, which flow round 
Britain from the immense Northern Ocean, daily 
meet and oppose one another beyond the mouth of 
the river Homelea, which runs into that narrow 
sea from the land of the Jutes, which belong to 
the country of the Jewissae ; after this struggling 
together of the two seas, they return into the 
ocean from whence they came." ' The historian 
thus accounts for the well-known phenomenon of 
the double flood in the Solent ; a tradition that 
the island had once been a part of the mainland 
could hardly have escaped mention by him, had 
any such existed in his time. 

But this has been a digression. We are follow- 
ing the now scattered fleet of racers down the 
western arm of the Solent. The promise of the 
morning is fulfilled, and the wind blows every 
minute with greater force. Each squall shows 
more strength than its predecessor, and the riplets 
swell to small but angy waves as the frequent 
gusts harass the water. The sky, too, wears 
a threatening aspect, and is loaded with great 
clouds rolling up and over one another. One 
vessel has lost her bowsprit, and, bearing up dis- 
consolately, runs home to her moorings. None 
carry topsails now, but all are under snug canvas 
long before the turning-point seaward is rounded. 
1 Bede, Ecclesiast. Hist., iv. 16. 




pq 

>» 

pq 



The Wight and the Solent Sea. 1 2 1 

As we hold on our way to sea, we pass through the 
fleet ; the vessels running home for the Brambles 
before a spanking breeze, some regain positions 
they had lost in beating to windward. 

Standing in on the port tack for Lymington 
River, you must needs go about when still far 
from the shore, for great banks of mud now choke 
the estuary. Yet there was a time when it was 
free enough to expose the old town to much haras- 
sing from French pirates and freebooters, who twice 
set it on fire. At the beginning of the last cen- 
tury, great ships (as vessels of seven or eight 
hundred tons were then considered) found easy 
access to its wharves. Now even the once famous 
saltpans are forgotten. Repelled by Lymington 
Spit, our vessel heads for Yarmouth, and there it 
is well to bring up, unless you can carry the tide 
through the Needles. There is safe anchorage in 
Yarmouth Roads, and at times also a rolling swell. 
It was here the Prince of Wales (afterwards Charles 
the Second) anchored his little fleet, when he 
landed his handful of loyal Hampshire men to 
make a bold but bootless attempt to release his 
father from Carisbrooke, where Hammond, his 
favourite chaplain's nephew, was his gaoler. The 
King was afterwards on parole at Newport, while 
negotiations were proceeding with the Parliament, 
both the negotiations and the King being jealously 
watched by the chiefs of the army. When it 
seemed that there would indeed be a treaty of 
Newport, these gentlemen resolved to act. In 



122 The British Seas. 

Christmas week, 1648, " on a night of storm and 
rain, Ewer beset His Majesty's lodgings with strange 
soldiers and a strange state of readiness, the smoke of 
their gun-matches poisoning the air of His Majesty's 
apartment itself; and on the morrow morning, at 
eight of the clock, calls out His Majesty's coach, 
moves off with His Majesty in grim reticence and 
rigorous military order to Hurst Castle, a small soli- 
tary stronghold on the opposite beach there." ' It 
was a grave offence that coming together of the 
King and the Commons, and both must be punished. 
To the King, the lonely wind-swept fortress, at the 
end of the projecting beach opposite Yarmouth, 
proved but a stage on the way to Whitehall. Colonel 
Pride was deputed to bring the House of Commons 
to its senses. 

Having weathered Hurst Castle, we are now in 
the deep and narrow channel between Colwell, Tot- 
land, and Alum Bays, and the Shingles. The rush- 
ing ebb is ruffled by an opposing wind. The 
bowsprit occasionally dips into the crest of a sea, 
and the water coming through the scuppers forward 
swishes along the lee-deck, as we bowl along under 
a single reef. There is an appearance of a freshen- 
ing breeze outside, and the prudent skipper thinks 
well to haul down a second reef. Therefore on our 
next tack, the jib is laid a-weather, the stay-sail 
lowered, and we lie head to wind. The weather- 
topping lift being hauled taut, the orders are given, 
as only a skipper can give orders, " Ease away the 
1 Carlyle's " Cromwell," 3. 



The Wight and the Solent Sea. 1 23 

peak-purchase,"-" Steady there,--" Stand by the 
throat halyards,"-" Lower away a little/ _«. Be ay 
all" Every available hand is now put to the tall 
of 'the reef tackle. Meanwhile, the mainsail flaps 
and flounders in the breeze, and resents with loud 
roars of anger the effort which is being made to 
reduce its dimensions. But with a "One, two 
three _haul!" they make fast, and in a moment 
later have tied the reef-points. Again the mainsail 
is peaked, the staysail set with a single reef, the 
vessel's head pays off from the wind and again she 
is forging on her way. Clear of the Needles, the 
view ranges to the west beyond Chnstchurch Bay 
and Durlston Point to St. Albans Head To the 
east, the coast of the island runs away to the tower- 
in-, height of St. Catherine's. Given a bright sky, 
a fresh summer breeze, and a white edging of foam 
at the base of the cliffs, the sea thundering against 
the Needle rocks as if to bring them, like old Lot s 
wife, to ruin, and you will confess yourself well re- 
paid for your beat down the Solent, and a wet 
thrash through the Needles. 

Having weathered the Needles, and heading for 
St. Catherine's, the land is not well discerned after 
Scratches Bay: the stupendous Main Bench runs 
inland to form the bay of Freshwater and is but 
dimly seen ; but as you draw towards the headland, 
beyond Brixton and Chale Bays, the land again 
comes into nearer view, and the general fea ures of 
the Blackgang Chine are perceptible This in- 
terrupts the cliff, a little to the west of St. Cath- 



124 The British Seas. 

erine's, in a place where it is over eight hundred feet 
in height. Two converging chasms join to form 
one declivitous crumbling gorge, from which, after 
heavy rains, the water is projected over the lower 
line of cliff in a cascade which falls unbroken for 
seventy feet. The seaboard is encumbered with 
huge masses of rock lying pell-mell in the wildest 
confusion. When the angry seas break furiously 
upon these, the thought occurs that the place was 
meant for shipwreck. Here, at any rate, in 1836, 
the Clarendon, West Indiaman, drove ashore in a 
gale of wind and was lost with all hands. To 
describe, with the detail they merit, the majestic 
cliffs and commanding promontories of this south- 
ern coast of the island ; the still loftier downs that 
rise behind ; the terraced towns nestling between the 
highlands and the sea ; the chines that break the 
cliff at intervals, presenting at times the aspect of 
weird and awful chasms, at others of ravines leafy 
and picturesque, — to describe all this would, if done 
by an expert hand, form the material of an interest- 
ing book. Much has been written of the Undercliff 
alone, the result of a primeval landslip between the 
headlands of St. Catherine's and Dunnose, which 
has left the hill-side standing sheer for miles, like a 
wall of the Titans' building, while below lies a 
wrecked but beauteous mingling of rock and sward 
and water, the victory of nature asserting itself over 
chaos. 

North-east of the Undercliff and the town of 
Ventnor, Dunnose is reached, the seaward abutment 



The Wight and the Solent Sea. 1 2 5 

of the towering heights of St. Boniface. Between 
this and the Culver stretches the open bay of 
Sandown. Off this part of the coast, especially 
with a wind off shore and a falling barometer, the 
mariner is warned to be on the alert for dangerous 
squalls blowing from the land. Terrific blasts 
descend from the uplands and bring destruction to 
the unwary. Thus perished off Dunnose, on a 
bright day in March, 1878, the ill-fated Eurydice. 
At half-past three in the afternoon she was seen 
from Ventnor by many who watched her with 
admiration, standing under all plain sail for her last 
headland, homeward bound with her crew of bright 
youths, ripe for their country's service, and now 
yearning for home after long absence. Before four 
o'clock, when almost in sight of port, she was struck 
by one of those awful squalls for which this coast is 
noted. This, before sail could be shortened, bore 
her over on her starboard broadside. The water 
rushed in through the open ports ; she never righted, 
but in a moment sank, two persons only out of two 
hundred and fifty being saved. Never did a ship 
meet so heartrending a fate. Assuredly she was 
named in an ill-omened hour, for her lot was that of 
Orpheus' wife : — 

" Jamque pedem referens casus evaserat omnes 
Redditaque Eurydice superas veniebat ad auras, 



En ! iterum crudelia retro 
Fata vocant." 

(VlRG., Georg., iv.) 

Sandown Bay terminates in the bold escarpment 



126 The British Seas. 

of the Culver, a dizzy height, upon the face of which 
the samphire-hunter to this day pursues the calling 
the awful perils of which are described by Edgar 
in the fourth act of " King Lear," a description 
which many believe was suggested by a visit paid by 
the poet to the Isle of Wight. Leaving the for- 
midable Culver astern, our course lies across White 
Cliff Bay and east of Bembridge Ledge. With the 
Nab on the starboard quarter, we catch a glimpse 
of the land-locked Brading Haven. In the effort to 
recover this from the sea's domain Sir Hugh Middle- 
ton expended much money and energy, with less 
success than attended him in his New River ven- 
ture. 

But little now remains to complete our little 
cruise. Passing under the lee of t the lightship on 
the Warner sands, we keep to weather of the fort, 
then head to windward, leave the Noman sands 
on the port hand, and come to anchor off Ryde. 
A line of low-lying forts breaks at intervals that flat 
shore that stretches from Gilkicker Point to Hayling 
Island. A little inland rise the frowning Portsdown 
Hills. We can discern, between the grim batteries 
of Sallyport and Blockhouse, the point that the 
fortifications which meet the eye on every turn on 
land and water are designed jealously to cover — the 
narrow entrance to the great harbour, which for 
centuries has been the nursery of Britain's naval 
prowess. Within, on the Gosport side, the tapering 
spars of the Victory and the Wellington are plainly 
seen, lit up by the slanting rays of the declining sun, 



The Wight and the Solent Sea. 129 

and recall the imperishable associations of the place. 
Hard by, on the eastern side, lies the pleasant 
Southsea Common, where in old days the strength 
of England was marshalled when invasion threat- 
ened ; while in the intervening space the racing 
fleet is scattered over the Solent, beating from the 
Warner to the Brambles against a strong headwind 
— so strong, indeed, that topmasts bend and creak, 
and ropes are strained to the utmost as the vessels 
gracefully yield to the breeze, and dipping the lee 
rail in the rushing sea display on the weather side 
the burnished copper of their hulls. A yacht-race 
is not always to the swift, and cautious seamanship 
will often count for more than natural speed sailing 
on a wind. As we watch the contest a sad disaster 
overtakes the leading schooner. Her foretopmast, 
overtried in such a wind by the great foretopsail she 
has been carrying, has parted at the cap and fallen 
across the foresail gaff. Grievous the havoc and fled 
the hope of victory. Her more prudent rival, with 
sail clewed up, shoots by, jubilant at the other's 
mishap. 

" Ilia noto citius volucrique sagitta 
Terrain fugit, el portu se condidit alto." 



CHAPTER VI 

ST. GEORGE'S CHANNEL. 

I had not originally intended to contribute a chapter 
to the present series of papers. It happens, how- 
ever, that our distinguished contributor. Mr. Clark 
Russell, has not felt able to go further than the 
estuary of the Severn in his description of the coast, 
though he has promised to resume it later on the 
south-eastern side of the island. Other contributors 
will deal with Scotland ; but the publisher has 
requested me. as a Lancashire man. to write upon 
St. George's Channel. I wish that my knowledge of 
the coast had been more recent and more complete. 
Unluckily I have no personal knowledge of the coast 
of South Wales, and shall therefore frankly borrow 
the descriptions of others. North Wales is. for me, 
bound up with the recollections of youth : the hrst 
sands I ever galloped over were the sands at Rhyl, 
and the first water I ever swam in was that of the 
Menai Straits. The Irish Sea was visible as a long 
thin line of silver, low on the evening sky. from the 
wild moorlands where I used to wander in my boy- 
hood. On my early excursions to Scotland. I used 
go a roundabout way by Liverpool in order to 



St. George s Channel. 131 

enjoy the pleasure of the sea voyage from that 
place to Glasgow. Still it is one of the regrets of 
my life not to have made better use of the Irish 
Sea when I lived near it — a regret intensified just 
now, when it has become a duty to write about it. 
I learned the rudiments of sailing on the Lanca- 
shire coast, but if it were all to come over again, 
there is not a nook or a corner from the Severn 
to the Solway that I would not explore ; and it may 
be affirmed quite seriously that a lad would under- 
stand his "Odyssey" better after knocking about 
through good and bad weather in a little yacht than 
by much fumbling of his lexicon. 

The Irish Sea is a sort of little Mediterranean, 
having land at least on three sides of it, for Scot- 
land would block the view to the north (if one 
could see so far), notwithstanding the escape to the 
ocean by the narrow north channel between Fair 
Head in Ireland and the redoubtable Mull of 
Kintyre. To the south the exit is much more 
open, yet between Cardigan Bay and the British 
Channel the land curves towards Ireland as if St. 
David's Head had a wish to meet Carnsore Point 
across fifty miles of sea. The basin, which is more 
specially called the Irish Sea, as distinguished from 
the two Channels, approaches more nearly to the 
circular form in consequence of the eastward retreat 
of the land on the coast of Lancashire and its 
advance in North Wales, so conveniently terminated 
by Anglesea, which makes the distance across to 
Dublin less than half what it is from the Lanca- 

K 2 



132 The British Seas. 

shire river Ribble. This little Mediterranean has 
two islands, or more properly one island only, for 
Anglesea is never felt to be an island when seen 
from the water, and is, in fact, no more than a 
broad promontory cut off from the mainland by a 
narrow channel that modern practical science has 
twice easily bridged over. The Isle of Man is a 
genuine island, well set in the midst of its own sea 
a little to the north, with a handsome margin of 
water all round it, and this bit of isolated territory, 
once a kingdom, rules rather grandly with its moun- 
tainous mass over its own expanse of waves. I con- 
fess that it has sometimes been a matter of almost 
personal regret to me, as a Lancashire man, that 
our little Mediterranean was not an archipelago, 
studded over with islands like the Cyclades ; indeed, 
if we could but invite some of the Hebrides and 
Orkney Islands, so cold and uncomfortable up there 
in the north, just to come and settle amongst us in 
the Irish Sea, the climate would seem to them, by 
contrast, almost delightful, and for us there would be, 
in the way of sketching and boating, a positive in- 
crease of happiness. When I think of that lovely 
inland sea of Japan, with its numerous beautiful 
islands, a place to wander over endlessly in a boat, I 
feel a little dissatisfied with our own — yet it has at 
least a great variety of coast, and its waves wash 
three kingdoms and a principality. 

The geography of the coast of South Wales may be 
remembered by its three principal bays — Caermar- 
then, St. Bride's, and Cardigan. The first is about 



St. Georges Channel. 135 

sixteen miles across at the entrance ; the second, 
thirteen ; and the third, sixty-four. The coast on 
the whole is dangerous, so that vessels give it a wide 
berth when their destination permits ; and yet this 
dangerous coast has an opening that makes one of 
the largest and most perfect harbours in the world. 
The north side of the Bristol Channel is interesting 
for us by artistic associations. Turner was in this 
region when still in his youth, before the close of 
the eighteenth century. Some of his earliest work 
was done on the banks of the river Towy. In 
our day the name of Kidwelly has become famous 
in the art-world as the subject of one of Mr. Haden's 
etchings. 

Tenby is one of the most fortunately situated 
places on the shores of Great Britain, with rocky 
heights, a castle, and a wide view over hay, and 
island, and shore. The situation is at the same 
time sheltered and commanding. It is sheltered 
from the south-west winds that beat into St. 
Bride's Bay across an unlimited expanse of sea 
(for Ireland is just too far north to protect it), whilst 
the east winds arrive at Tenby after crossing England 
and South Wales and troubling Caermarthen Bay. 
For shelter it is almost comparable to Oban, and the 
climate (being about three hundred and thirty miles 
more to the south) is more temperate. If this 
region reminds one of Western Scotland by its bays 
and islands, it carries the resemblance still further 
by the possession of a salt-water loch — a genuine 
loch that would have borne the title if it had been 



136 The British Seas. 

north of the Clyde. There is nothing like Milford 
Haven in England or France. When nature under- 
takes to do anything in the way of engineering, she 
does it supremely well. The Menai Straits are a 
better maritime canal than Panama could be made 
with twice the sixty millions that it has cost. There 
is no artificial harbour like Milford Haven, with its 
" thirteen roadsteads, affording anchorage to the 
largest ships," its fifteen creeks and bays, and its 
fifteen to nineteen fathoms of water almost every- 
where. Guarded by its sheltering hills, the fleets of 
England might rest at anchor on its waters. Such 
a haven is a great national possession ; it is unfor- 
tunate only that circumstances have not favoured 
the growth of some populous commercial city there, 
such as Manchester, which is now creating a sea- 
port for itself by a vast expenditure. The forces of 
Nature make natural harbours ; commercial or mili- 
tary reasons determine the sites of cities. The town 
of Milford is remarkable as being one of the very 
few which have been built by a single human will, 1 
as ancient cities were sometimes founded by the fiat 
of a despotic sovereign. It is easier to build a 
town than to induce a population to settle there. 
Milford has not been very prosperous, but now it is 
said to be brightening, and there is some animation 
in its once almost deserted streets. There were but 
three streets originally, and yet too many. Even 
old historical Pembroke, at the end of one of the 

1 That of the Hon. C. F. Greville, nephew of Sir William 
Hamilton, the diplomatist. 



Si. George s Channel. 137 

great bays of Milford Haven, is said to be a dull 
place, but it has the artistic and antiquarian 
interest of a great historical castle whose ruins 
occupy a promontory between two inlets of the sea. 
Salt-water lochs are, however, very rarely compar- 
able to fresh-water lakes for the amenities of beauti- 
ful landscape, and Milford Haven has the usual 
characteristics of treeless hills and shores left deso- 
lote by the receding tides. 

Yachtsmen know little of the coast of Wales, 
which is so dangerous that they give it a wide berth. 
I am fortunate in being able to quote from a vivid 
description of its perils. Mr. Richardson, of Bala, 
corresponded with me many years ago on the subject 
of lifeboats, and sent me a narrative, which is very 
little known, of "The Cruise of the Challenger Life- 
boat, and Voyage from Liverpool to London in 
1852." He coasted all Wales as far as Mumbles' 
Head, close to Swansea Bay, and kept much 
nearer to the land than a yacht would have done, 
as the Challenger was, in fact, a catamaran, drawing 
only nine inches of water with twenty persons on 
board, and able to go through the wildest seas 
with no risk except that of a wetting. The only 
inconvenience of Mr. Richardson's narrative is that 
he travelled from north to south, and we are going 
northwards. The boat, or catamaran, was rigged 
with two lug-sails and a jib, and her want of keel 
was remedied to some extent by centre-boards. 

The Challenger left Caernarvon in very wild 
weather, towards the end of April. A sloop at sea 



138 The British Seas. 

had her main-sail blown to ribands the same 
morning. The Challenger herself was obliged, five 
times, to let everything fly, that the sails might not 
be torn to pieces. " The coast was rocky and dan- 
gerous, the sea perfectly white with foam, and the 
Welsh mountains enveloped in clouds, with the scud 
whirling round and past, flying away to seaward. 
At times the sun shone brightly, and the scenery 
was magnificent." Near Porthdynllaen, the sea was 
breaking furiously on a lee-shore, and the Challenger 
nearly got upon the rocks, but she reached a place of 
shelter behind a rude breakwater. At the western 
entrance of the port there was a sunken rock called 
the Chwislan, which at that time was not marked. 
In the afternoon they ascended a hill behind the 
village, "and walked across the isthmus to view the 
sea on the opposite side, and visit a remarkable 
subterranean passage which its waves had excavated 
some distance towards the centre of the mountain, 
which then breaking out, wash up its sides, occasion- 
ing extraordinary sounds." 

Boats with a very small draught of water often 
do things alarming to spectators on the shore. On 
leaving Porthdynllaen, the Challenger ran through a 
passage close to the western rocks, whilst the inhabi- 
tants, shouting to warn them off, believed they were 
going to destruction. " The coast is indented with 
miniature bays and creeks, and fringed and studded 
with rocks, for the continual breaking of the sea on 
them gives an appearance of fringe ; and sea-birds 
and gulls of all descriptions are here more numerous 



St. George s Channel. i 39 

than on any other part of this coast." At Bardsey 
there is a well-known tide-race; but the ChalLngcr 
passed it at a comparatively favourable moment, 
and " sailed across the bay called Hell's Mouth, 
which, in a south-westerly gale, must be a perfect 
Phlegethon." The crew take to their oars towards 
evening on approaching St. Tudwald's Island and 
Roads ; then the wind, drawing round to the south- 
ward of east, they make all sail, and run ashore 
through the surf in Abersoch Bay. 

The vcyage is resumed on the following morning, 
when Barmouth is dimly visible, north of Cader 
Idris, about twenty miles away. " It was a beautiful 
wild row. We passed under a high, bluff-headland, 
covered with sea-birds, so tame that they permitted 
our approach within an oar's length. Sheep also 
appeared, perched on the points and ledges of the 
rocks hanging over the sea, and where they seemed 
to have scarce footing or herbage." 

In this bay there is a remarkable shoal. The 
Challenger took soundings on passing over it, and 
found three fathoms and a half. It is attributed by 
tradition to human agency, and particularly to St. 
Patrick, who must have been truly a wonderful 
engineer. The southern extremity is at Sarnbwlch, 
and runs out to sea about five miles ; the northern, 
off Harlech, extends for twenty miles, " and it is 
singular that at its extremity the compass loses its 
power and will not work. They are fearful and 
dangerous shoals to vessels embayed." The Challen- 
ger here met with squally weather, and struck on the 



140 The British Seas. 

rocks near Sarnbwlch, but got off without damage, 
after which the crew had a row of seven miles, 
against wind and tide, to Barmouth. Detained here 
or in the neighbourhood by bad weather the Challenger 
leaves Barmouth finally on May igth, at one p.m., 
and about four in the afternoon runs into the mouth 
of the Towyn river. Here the shore was composed 
of sand and shingle, and tolerably flat, so that it was 
possible to tow. In the afternoon of May 20th, the 
crew row into Cardigan, and find a strong tide 
against them between the mainland and the island. 
Next day they have a hard pull round Dinas Head, 
and find the rock scenery bold and grand. They row 
into Fishguard and leave towards midnight in the 
dark, pulling through a chopping sea without wind. 
In this way they pass Strumble Head at half-past one 
in the morning. After a glorious sunrise they reach 
St. David's Head. 

" Salt sprays deluge it, wild waves buffet it, hurricanes rave ; 
Summer and winter the depths of the ocean girdle it round : 
In leaden dawns, in golden noontides, in silvery moonlight, 
Never it ceases to hear the old sea's mystical sound. 
Surges vex it evermore, 
By grey cave and sounding shore." 

Mr. Richardson gave a stirring description of the 
headland, which the reader may thank me for quoting 
in his own words : — 

" ' Too late for the tide,' said the pilot, ' the race has begun. 
And it was running in earnest. We lay on our oars for a few 
minutes to get breath previous to having a dash at it. It was a 
splendid sight ; the rocks towering over our heads in the 
wildest and most rugged forms ; vessels coming through with 

1 Lewes Morris : " Songs of Two Worlds. — St. David's Head." 



Si. Georges Channel. 141 

the tide, rolling and plunging, the seas going clean over some 
of the smaller ones, and the water spouting out of their scuppers 
as if in a heavy gale, although there was not a breath of wind. 
• Now for it ! ' exclaimed all hands ; ' you steer, pilot, and keep 
us within oar's length of the rocks.' A few strokes and we were 
fairly into it ; the tide caught her bow and canted her head off 
into the overfalls. (At this point of the narrative the pilot loses 
his wits, looking behind him and -expecting to be pooped, so the 
captain replaces him.) The captain kept her steady, and we 
soon shot into the smooth water of Whitesand Bay, where we 
anchored amidst an amphitheatre of towering rocks and pre- 
cipitous headlands, thrown in mixed, confused, and chaotic 
masses, grand and beautiful. As we lay thus moored to the 
rocks we observed with surprise the beautiful blue colour and 
pellucid character of the water, so clear that small fish 
swimming, and shells, and small crabs crawling, could be easily 
discerned at a great depth, whilst a few hundreds yards off, 
in the Sound, the race was running, boiling, and roaring with 
inconceivable violence." 

Being now safely moored to the rock, the crew ot 
the Challenger enjoyed a quiet sleep in their rugs, 
and afterwards pulled round Horn Point into St. 
Bride's Bay, and sailed across it with a light breeze. 
In Broad Sound they encountered very wild water, and 
a strong head-wind, but had the tide in their favour 
till they saw the two lighthouses on St. Anne's Head, 
when it turned against them, and they rounded the 
point laboriously at the oars, landing in Milford 
Haven at eight in the evening, in the Cove of Dale, 
utterly exhausted. 

This is the right way to see a coast, but it re- 
quires a lifeboat, and some hardihood. Yachts and 
steamers keep at a respectful distance from shores of 
this only too picturesque quality. Our voyagers had 
evidently an eye for the picturesque, but they were 
practically more concerned with tide-races. Mr. 
Richardson just mentions Harlech, which by the 



142 The British Seas. 

dignity of its situation and the imposing grandeur of 
its ruins has attracted many a landscape painter. The 
contrast between the castles of Harlech and Caer- 
narvon is that each has what the other lacks. 
Harlech is a simpler and smaller building than 
Caernarvon, but it has a magnificent situation, 
whilst that of Caernarvon is low, and only gains some 
advantage by being near water and shipping, and by 
its hilly distances, including the Snowdon range. 

The Castle at Caernarvon is one of the grandest in 
the world, with its thirteen polygonal towers and its 
numerous turrets scattered over a vast irregular site 
and connected by massive and lofty walls. The 
irregularity of the architectural arrangement gives a 
charming variety to the views. This castle is not 
quite so sternly simple as some other great feudal 
fortresses. There are traceried windows in the state 
apartments, and there is a little sculpture, if only the 
damaged eagles on the Eagle Tower, and the canopied 
statue of Edward I. over the great entrance. The 
architecture is not, however, in itself very various, 
and it seems to want the dominant feature of a great 
central keep, which is so conspicuous a merit in 
Windsor. The prevailing idea at Caernarvon is the 
repetition of the polygonal tower, as at Beaumaris 
and Conway it is the repetition of the round tower. 
At Beaumaris there are ten round towers in the outer 
defences and ten for the inner, besides four that flank 
the gateways. Beaumaris has no advantage of situa- 
tion, except that its meadows are beautiful, and so are 
the views from them across the widening Beaumaris 



St. Georges Channel. 145 

Bay with Penmaenmawr in the distance. Conway, on 
the other hand, is magnificently situated, and has 
eight round towers of a more imposing size than 
those of Beaumaris. One of them was cut away for 
half its lower circumference by the railway engineers) 
but as the upper half still remained suspended in air, 
like a corbel, they left it. These magnificent old 
castles would be pleasanter objects of contemplation 
if they had been erected in defence of liberty rather 
than as instruments of oppression. Penrhyn Castle 
is interesting as a modern experiment in Norman 
baronial architecture. It is a long time since I saw 
it, but I well remember the impression produced by 
its hugeness and the gloom of the grave Norman 
keep with its walls of dark Mona marble. It is 
strange that so grave and military a style should 
have been chosen for a modern habitation, but Pen- 
rhyn, in an age of revivals, was a more successful 
attempt than the false and meagre Gothic of Eaton 
Hall, which the present owner has wisely concealed 
or demolished. 

The Menai Strait is the prettiest little channel any- 
where amongst the British Islands. It is rather 
longer than Windermere, and would present exactly 
the appearance of a narrow lake were it not that the 
tide often changes the lake into a rapid river. 1 The 
shores being very rich in wood, and rocky in some 
parts, with mountainous distances, compose delightful 

1 If I may trust the authorities before me, the speed of the 
tide in the Menai Strait must be, at times, considerably greater 
than that of the Rhone between Lyons and Avignon. 



146 The British Seas. 

landscapes, which are not spoiled by the two 
wonderful bridges. The Telford Suspension Bridge 
is a model of elegance, certainly one of the most 
graceful suspension bridges in the world. Ste- 
phenson's tubular structure, the Britannia, is sternly 
simple, but it is not ugly. Considered as archi- 
tecture, it is but a return to the primitive con- 
struction with the beam on pillars, before the in- 
vention of the arch. The towers were judiciously 
designed so as to break the long line of tube. At 
the time of its construction everybody believed that 
tubular bridges would be generally adopted, but they 
have no.t been, and now that the cantilever principle 
is triumphant on the Forth, and proposed for the 
Channel, they are, in fact, superseded. 

It appears from a letter from Lord Clarendon 
that towards the close of the seventeenth century 
travellers from Conway to Beaumaris passed over 
Penmaenmawr. Lady Clarendon was in a litter, 
and the rest of the company on horseback, except 
that his lordship walked. As for his coach, it was 
to have been taken off its wheels and carried over 
the mountain by sheer strength of human arms. 
However, it was drawn over the hill by horses, tan- 
dem fashion, with three or four men behind " that it 
might not slip back," and this was a great inno- 
vation. The servants and horses were ferried over 
in little round sea-boats. In Anglesea Lady 
Clarendon is put into the litter again, ''for never 
was or can come a coach into that part of the 
country." 




L 2 



St. Georges Channel. 149 

Anglesea is not one of the ideal islands. It is not 
sufficiently detached from the mainland, and its hills, 
such as they are, do not give it a decided unity like 
those of the small mountainous islands. Murray 
says that " the west coast of Anglesea, which is 
seldom or never visited, contains coast scenery of a 
high order." 

Between Anglesea and the river Dee there is 
some of the grandest coast scenery in Great Britain. 
I do not remember any sea-cliff, even on the west 
coast of Scotland, that produces a more overpower- 
ing effect than the mass of limestone called " Great 
Orme's Head." The steamers from Liverpool to 
Beaumaris pass, as it seems, almost close under it ? 
so that travellers by water enjoy its full magnificence, 
and have the pleasure of looking at a very dangerous 
place from a position of safety. Mr. Richardson 
mentions the wreck of the brig Orvisby, that went 
ashore here in the dark : one man was stowing the 
jib, not usually a safe occupation in a storm, yet it 
proved so in his case, for when the vessel struck he 
dropped off the bowsprit on a ledge of rock, and 
was the only man saved. Mr. Richardson adds : — 
" Lifeboats of little or no service here with the wind 
dead on ; difficult to say what would be of service, 
as the cliff rises nearly perpendicular. Here the 
tide met us running like a sluice ; the evening- 
closing in and getting very dark, our position was by 
no means pleasant." They pulled out to sea and 
got a breeze. 

The shipwreck of '■* Lycidas " took place some- 



150 The British Seas. 

where near the mouth of the Dee. Milton's 
" learned friend was unfortunately drowned in his 
passage from Chester on the Irish seas, 1637." 
Turner appears to have misunderstood a passage 
towards the close of the poem in which Milton 
thinks of the body as possibly washed away as far 
as the Hebrides in one direction, or the " guarded 
mount " in the other. Turner makes the shipwreck 
of " Lycidas " occur close under St. Michael's 
Mount. 

The fine estuary of the Dee looks very important 
on the map, but the commercial value of it is as 
nothing in comparison with the narrower Mersey. 
The antiquarian and artistic interest belonging to it 
are connected mainly with Flint Castle and the 
curious old city of Chester. Our reproduction of 
Girtin's drawing will give some idea of the castle as 
it was more than ninety years ago. Forty-six years 
after Girtin's premature death, a considerable part 
of Flint Castle fell, in consequence of having been 
slowly undermined by the sea. The citadel of Flint 
Castle is round, -and is called the Double Tower, 
because there are two walls, a larger and a lesser 
circle. I have not seen Chester for more than thirty 
years, but when I visited the place it was as good as 
old Rouen for the preservation of mediaeval houses, 
though on a less important scale. I remember 
especially the long and broad galleries of oak which 
made it possible to walk a considerable distance on 
the level of the first floors. Liverpool I know much 
better, having been there frequently, the last time in 



Si. Georges Channel. 153 

1882. The impression it gave me then was that of 
a place now very truly and completely represent- 
ative of everything that is best in Lancashire except 
its scenery, and except, of course, that rural life 
which still survives in some parts in spite of manu- 
factures. The Mersey did not seem to be greatly 
changed, except that the docks and sheds were 
more extensive, and the shipping on a still more 
important scale. I visited one of the vessels of the 
White Star Line, the Celtic, and examined all the 
wonderfully ingenious arrangements by which a 
dense population of emigrants and richer people 
are conveyed across the Atlantic in tolerable 
decency and comfort. The most obvious qualities 
of the ship were her size, space, cleanliness, and 
orderly subdivision ; but I was more surprised by 
the extreme promptitude with which, by the 
discipline of long practice and incessant improve- 
ments, a vessel of that importance could be dis- 
charged and reladen, so that she lost a minimum of 
time between her trips. An engineer told me that 
he had visited many interesting places, but without 
seeing them, as during the short rest of the engines 
in port they had to be thoroughly cleaned and ex- 
amined. The workers must look upon the passen- 
gers as enviable idlers, but the passengers for the 
most part are either sick or dull, and only want to 
be put ashore. The modern contest with distance 
has never been better exemplified than in these 
swift vessels, terrible consumers of coal, that are 
always rushing across the Atlantic without a pause, 
but never without danger. 



154 The British Seas. 

Liverpool left a mixed impression on my mind ; 
the brownish-yellowish waters of the Mersey were, as 
it happened, agitated by a strong breeze as the 
ferry-boats plied on them rapidly under a dull sky, 
and the steamers went out to sea, leaving the smoke 
of Liverpool behind them for the bleak and grey 
expanse, the unquiet plain, that stretches thence to 
Ireland. Liverpool, itself, seemed more gloomy 
than I remembered it of yore, but a finer city, with 
increasing magnificence of architecture. It is diffi- 
cult for English towns, with all their wealth, to make 
themselves charming or beautiful — the climate and 
the smoke forbid it — but they may be grand, and 
that Liverpool certainly has now become. It may 
seem strange that so practical a place should be the 
home of Rossetti's most poetical picture, Dante's 
Dream; yet if men are to feel the ennobling in- 
fluence of imaginative art, it must be made accessible 
to them in great cities. The Walker Gallery is a 
fine institution, which has a great future before it. 
I had not time to visit any private collections. 
With regard to a more practical matter, the Man- 
chester Ship Canal, I was told by a civil engineer 
that it was a wild scheme that could never be 
realized : an opinion then prevalent in Liverpool. 
It seems, however, at the present day, rather more 
hopeful than Panama. The reader will not require 
me to attempt a description of the enormous Liver- 
pool docks. He knows what a dock is, and what to 
expect when there are forty miles of quay. 

The Lancashire coast above Liverpool is flat and 




o 

u 

S 
td 



St. George s Channel. 157 

uninteresting from the sea, the chief variety of it 
being in the prosperous villages. Southport, 
situated just opposite to Lytham, on the south side 
of the estuary of the Ribble, has grown into a water- 
ing-place of much importance, having a reputation 
for a mild climate. Southport, Lytham, and Black- 
pool, the three principal watering-places of Lan- 
cashire, have changed so much since I knew them, 
that it is useless for me to describe them. They 
have lost the charm of obscure little places to gain 
the advantages, with the drawbacks, of celebrity, and 
they have long since passed out of that primitive 
condition most appreciated by artists. From 
Lytham northwards, the coast becomes more inter- 
esting as it rises in cliffs, not comparable, however, 
to those on the coast of Wales. The sea comes in 
grandly at Blackpool when the west wind is strong, 
as the width from there to Ireland is about a 
hundred and thirty miles. I remember seeing the 
Isle of Man from Blackpool, its mountains pale but 
distinct in the clear air across sixty miles of sea. 
My recollection of Fleetwood is that of a new port, 
just struggling into existence. Like Milford, it owes 
its origin to the foresight of a single landowner. 

Fleetwood is not, even yet, very important or 
attractive, but for us it has a peculiar interest, as 
that point of the western English coast where it 
first becomes northern in character, at least in the 
distant views. From Fleetwood one can see across 
the dozen miles' width of Morecambe Bay to the 
Cumberland Hills ; to my eyes a most refreshing 



158 TJie British Seas. 

and exhilarating sight, especially after the muggy 
distances of South Lancashire, where the genuine 
mountain blue is a colour utterly unknown. It is 
probable that the existence of The Portfolio once 
depended upon an incident on the shore of More- 
cambe Bay. I had ridden on horseback to Lan- 
caster, and wished to ride across the sands. A man 
in Lancaster asked if my horse was to be trusted. 
I said he was strong, but liable to fits of sullen 
obstinacy, and the man dissuaded me from the at- 
tempt. It so happened that my beast had one of his 
worst fits of obstinacy that day, but in a safer place 
than the middle of Lancaster sands. Many a man 
and horse have been drowned there, from a prefer- 
ence (on the man's part) of the segment to the 
arc. 

After Morecambe Bay comes the entrance to 
Wordsworth's River Duddon, and then the shore of 
Cumberland up into the Solway. The Cumberland 
mountains are seen as distances from the sea, but 
they are not so near the coast as Cader Idris. 
Those about Wast W T ater are as near the sea as 
Snowdon. Even the distant sight of them is full of 
pleasant suggestion, as we know that the beautiful 
lakes are nestling in their hollows. 

The reader will, perhaps, excuse me if I do not 
attempt a description of Ireland and the Isle of Man. 
My way of describing places is simply to give my 
own impressions of them, with an occasional refer- 
ence to geography when it clears up such a matter as 
the width of a lake or a bay. I have seen Ireland 



St. Georges Channel. 159 

and the Isle of Man several times, but have never 
landed on either of them. What I saw was nothing 
but hills across a few miles of water, so that these 
islands remain for me as indefinite as the " Kingdom 
by the sea," in Poe's poem of " Annabel Lee." As 
all true poets are aware, there is a poetical value even 
in this very vagueness, and my Ireland, with purple 
hills mingling with the clouds of sunset, beyond 
troubled waters rolling far and wide, is in some ways 
grander for me than the rather too much detailed 
Ireland of my daily newspaper. I will go no further 
into politics than to express a sentimental regret that 
the second Earl of Derby, in 1504, relinquished the 
title of King of Man. One of his successors approved 
of his resignation, on the ground that the island would 
not maintain its independence against other nations, 
and that it was " not fitting for a king to be subject to 
any other king but the King of kings," a principle 
not much respected in the present German Empire. 
My regret is purely sentimental and poetical. The 
central island of the British dominions is neither an 
English nor an Irish country, it is not a part of Scot- 
land — it is truly a little nation, with a language and 
even a local parliament, and some coinage of its 
own. The retention of a kingly title would have 
marked this nationality, and there would have been 
little danger to the " adjacent island of Great Britain " 
from the fleets of his Manx Majesty. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE WEST COAST OE SCOTLAND. 

It may almost be said that Scotland has two 
western coasts, which may be roughly described as 
an inner and an outer. The inner is sheltered by 
an almost continuous line of islands. Thanks to 
the Crinan Canal, 1 which divides the neck of the 
peninsula of Cantyre, the tourist may make his 
way from Greenock (which, rather than Glasgow, 
is practically the point of departure) to Tobermory, 
in Mull, without feeling the force of the Atlantic 
waves, though now and then, if the wind sets in a 
particular direction, he will get some idea of what 
they can be and do. Tobermory past, the shelter 
ceases, or becomes very slight indeed, till Skye is 
reached. Skye, sheltered itself by the line of the 
Outer Hebrides, protects the channel between it 
and the mainland. The winds indeed, come down 
from the hills on either side with terrific force, but 
the waves have no space to rise. North of Skye 

1 The Crinan Canal was constructed for the benefit of the 
fishing and coasting trade of the Western Highlands in the 
years 1793 — 1801. 



The West Coast of Scotland. 1 6 1 

comes the broad channel of the Minch. Of this the 
north wind is the master, 

" To raise or still 
The angry billows at his will." 

And very angry they can be ; for they come, not 
with the majestic roll of the Atlantic waves, but with 
a shorter and more " choppy " motion, not unlike 
that of the English Channel, acknowledged to be the 
deadliest of all seas that are. Both routes have 
singular, though different, attractions. Following 
the one, we watch, through an endless variety of 
scenes, how the sea, to use the graphic words of 
Tacitus — words suggested, we may easily believe, by 
personal observation — " makes many a deep inlet 
and circling sweep, and thrusts itself into the midst 
of hills and mountains as if into its own domain." 
If we are venturesome enough to take the other, we 
have the spectacle of the Atlantic breaking on the 
coast with a grandeur of which, monotonous as it 
may be, one never wearies. Of both routes I shall 
have something to say. 

The two water-ways divide at the southern end of 
the island of Bute. If we elect to follow the inner 
line we travel almost due north, and before long 
find ourselves in the famous waters of Loch Fyne. 
No classic sea, or stream, or lake, has achieved 
the reputation which has been given to Loch 
Fyne by its herrings. Some speciality of flavour, 
as indefinable as such specialities mostly are, and 
often, we may believe, the creature of imagination, 
is said to distinguish them. The fisheries of the 

M 



1 62 The British Seas. 

loch itself are not what they were. Experts say 
that the shoals are now rather to be found in the 
open seas than in these land-locked waters, where, 
indeed, the pursuit is urged more incessantly and 
with deadlier effect, but the name survives in full 
force, and probably will survive, even should the 
reality cease. 

Loch Fyne is one of the largest of the Scottish 
" fiords/' From the point where the rivulet from 
which it takes, or with which it shares, its name, 
to that where it merges in the Sound of Bute, it 
has a length of more than forty miles. Not far 
from its head waters on its western shore is 
Inverary, the famous seat of the Maccallum More, 
now represented by the ducal house of Argyll. 
The loftiest mountains it can boast are Ben-an- 
Lochain (2955 feet) and Ben Bheula (2557), and 
it must yield the palm for grandeur to some of its 
more northern rivals ; but it is often very beautiful, 
especially where, as among the woods of Inverary, 
nature has felt the improving hand of man. The 
southern end, where the heights of Arran rise 
directly in front of the spectator and Bute can be 
seen on his left hand, is perhaps the finest piece 
of scenery that it can show. Mr. Pennell's sketch 
is taken from a point looking towards Inverary. 

We will now turn for awhile to the outer route. 
To follow this we must sail almost due south till 
Arran, which has been lying on our right hand, is 
passed, and then turn in a westerly direction, but with 
still a slight leaning to the south. So we reach in 



The West Coast of Scotland. 165 

due time the " Mull," or headland which terminates 
the remarkable peninsula of Cantyre. As we round 
this we experience the full force of the Atlantic waves. 
Even on a windless day the long swell comes rolling 
in from three thousand miles of ocean, for there is 
nothing here between us and the Labrador coast. 
And when the wind blows, as it does blow with 
a quite remarkable frequency, from the west, there is 
a scene of magnificent turmoil. The waves dash 
wildly on the rocks, broken already into countless 
shapes by the storms of centuries, sweeping far up 
the height of the cliff, and sending showers of spray 
a long way over it. When we turn our eyes away 
from this ever-changing spectacle, we see, some 
dozen miles to the south-west, the dim outlines of 
the Irish coast. 1 

No other land is in view, for it is only on the 
clearest day that we can possibly catch a glimpse of 
Islay, and this hardly from the Mull itself. But if 
we land and climb Knockmoss (the Hill of the Plain), 
we can see to the west and north Islay and Jura, 
and sometimes even, but this is very rare, the distant 
mountains of Mull, while the hills of Arran rise to 
the east, and Ailsa Craig is dimly seen on the 
horizon. 

There is scarcely a quieter region than Cantyre, 
or one less touched with the stir and change of 
modern times. It lies out of the range of the tourist, 

1 The nearest point of Ireland is Turpoint, in the county of 
Antrim. The exact distance between this and the Mull s 
eleven miles and a half. 



1 66 The British Seas. 

and so keeps undisturbed its primitive ways of life 
and thought. In earlier times it had a very stirring 
and even tragic history. At Saddle Castle, on the 
eastern coast, the Bruce was entertained by Angus 
Macdonald, Lord of Cantyre, who afterwards did 
good service for him on the right wing of the Scottish 
army at Bannockburn. Three centuries later the 
Macdonalds had to fight for their land and lives 
against their neighbours and rivals, the Argyll 
Campbells. They were driven from Cantyre in the 
early part of the seventeenth century, but recovered 
it again after Montrose's victory at Inverlochy. 
Montrose's brief career of victor\ — it lasted scarcely 
eight months — came to an end at Philiphaugh, and 
two years afterwards Cantyre was the only place 
that held out against the party of the Covenant. In 
July, 1647, their last refuge, Dunaverty Castle, was 
compelled to surrender. All the garrison were 
massacred, but one young Macdonald, an infant at 
the breast, son of Archibald Og of Sanda (a little 
island which the traveller passes on his way to the 
Mull), was saved by his nurse. 

Our course now lies through the Sound of Islay, 
with Islay on the one hand — an island ranking 
fourth in size among the Hebrides, and famous for 
its manufacture of whiskey — and the bolder heights 
of Jura on the other. We leave some way on the 
right Coryvrechan, 2 the Maelstrom of these coasts, 

- At full length " Corry-vreachan,' or Caldron of Breachkan. 
Breachkan, according to the legend, was a Norwegian prince 
who sued for the hand of a princess of the Isles. Her father 
consented, if Breachkan would anchor his vessel for three days 



The West Coast of Scotland. 167 

the terrors of which are even more the creatures of 
imagination than those of the Norwegian whirlpool, 
and on the left Colonsay, with its satellite of 
Oronsay. Were we to follow the route of the open 
sea, we should come to Iona (Icolmkill) and, some 
ten miles further to the north, to Staffa. Both these 
islands lie to the westward of Mull. But the track 
of the steamers lies on the eastern side of that 
island, and the steamers are, with the exception of 
a few yachts and fishing boats, almost the only 
frequenters of these seas. Beautiful as these waters 
are with a manifold beauty, they do not offer to 
those who would traverse them the inducements 
either of safety or of gain. The great routes of 
commerce are far away, and the shore is one of 
those which the sailor loves best when he sees it 
least. 

The next spot at which I will ask my readers to 
halt is Oban, which we reach by a channel which 
bears the name of the " Firth of Lorn," a name full 
of historical associations. Oban is quite of the 
present. No spot in the Western Highlands is 
better known or more frequented. Daily, for some 
months in the year, the double stream of travellers 
flows nortrrward and southward through it. This 
constant stream has left little that is characteristic 

in the whirlpool. The prince, instructed by the wise men, 
procured three cables, one of hemp, one of wool, and one of 
woman's hair. The first day the hempen cable broke, the 
cable of wool on the second ; the hair would have held out, but 
that one lock that had been woven into it came from the head 
of a faithless fair; and Breachkan was drowned. 



1 68 The British Seas. 

in the town itself. The English have conquered it 
as they have conquered Boulogne. But there is 
little change even in the immediate neighbourhood. 
This island of Kerrera, for instance, protecting the 
bay of Oban from the westerly winds, in which Mr. 
Colin Hunter has found a subject, is probably little 
different in aspect from what it was some six 
centuries and a half ago, when Alexander II. of 
Scotland died there. Possibly these gulls that are 
seen in the foreground are vexed somewhat by the 
idle sport by which the Englishman gratifies the 
national passion for slaughter ; but they are the 
descendants of tribes which have dwelt on these 
rocks for more centuries than one can count. 
Here, in this almost nameless island, we find, as 
so often in these regions, places that are now, so to 
speak, left high and dry, but were once in the full 
stream of history. This rugged little Kerrera, for 
instance, reminds us of all the interesting story of 
the rise and fall of the Norse dominion in the 
Western Isles. It was the business of asserting the 
supremacy of the Scottish throne that brought 
Alexander and his fleet to these parts. Angus of 
Argyll, we are told, had been wont to do homage 
for certain islands to the King of Norway. Alexander 
claimed that this homage should be done to himself, 
and, on Angus refusing to obey, gathered a force to 
compel him, and, being seized with fever, died on 
Kerrera, at a place still called, it is said, Dalree, or 
"the King's Field." 

Straight before us as we leave Oban, lies the island 



The West Coast of Scotland. 1 7 1 

of Lismore, the "Great Garden/' at the entrance to 
Loch Linnhe. This beautiful fiord runs inland, if 
we reckon as one with it what is commonly known 
as Lower Loch Eil, for a distance of more than 
thirty miles. If we penetrate to its higher end we 
shall find ourselves at the south-western end of the 
Caledonian Canal, the useful work by which the 
Glen-More-nan-Albin (the great valley of Scotland), 
between the North Sea and the Atlantic, has been 
made a practicable route for vessels of moderate 
size. 1 But this would take us too far away from our 
route. Lower down we may see on either hand a 
region famous in story. On the right hand — I am 
supposing that our faces are turned landwards — is 
Appin, familiar to us from that admirable story, the 
best, surely, of all that have been written on the 
subject of the Jacobite wars, Mr. R. L. Stevenson's 
" Kidnapped." On our left rise, with a somewhat 
bleak aspect, the hills of Morven. The name 
suggests the legendary heroes of Scottish story — 
Fingal, the king ; and Ossian, warrior and poet ; 
and Oscar, the short-lived Achilles of the North. 
Whether these were real men, who knows ? Who 
can say whether Hector, or Achilles, or Ajax, or 
^Eneas ever lived in the flesh ? But that they were 
genuine in the literary sense there can be very little 
doubt. Macpherson, of course, travestied them, and 
made them as little like their real selves, the weird 

1 The Caledonian Canal is sixty-two miles in length, forty 
passing through natural lakes (Loch Lochy, Loch Oich, and 
Loch Ness), and twenty-two having b^en cut. 



172 The British Seas. 

creatures of the old Celtic imagination, as " car- 
penter's gothic " is like Wells Cathedral. But that 
they had a true poetical existence ages before 
Macpherson was heard of is most certainly true. 
Whether these heroic personages, or such dim 
prototypes as they may have had, had any special 
connection with this Argyleshire Morven is more 
doubtful. Morven, according to one etymology, 
for which, however, I do not venture to vouch, is 
simply More-Earrain, the " mainland." 

I hope that the seals which Mr. Colin Hunter 
has put in the foreground of his picture, will never 
become as mythical as Ossian's heroes. They are 
certainly rarer in these parts than they were some 
years ago ; in fact, they have many enemies. 
Their hides are valuable, not as fur, it must be 
understood (for the " fur seal " is never found on 
the British coasts), but as leather, and so is the oil 
yielded by their fat. Salmon-fishers, too, whether 
they seek profit with the net or sport with the rod, 
have a grudge against the creature, and it must be 
confessed that he has a way of haunting the mouths 
of streams, and catches not a few fish while they 
are waiting in the sea for a freshet or spate (Anglice, 
a flood) which will enable them to seek their wonted 
breeding-places in the upper waters. It must go 
hard with any creature against whom the greed of 
gain and the still more cruel jealousy of sport com- 
bine to make war. The larger dwellers in the 
sea, however, are not yet wholly banished from 
these waters. Sometimes the inhabitants of one of 




Duntulm Castle, Isle of Skye. From a drawing by J. Pennell. 



The West Coast of Scotland. 175 

the remoter islands are delighted and enriched by 
the capture of a "school " of bottle-nosed whales. 
Sometimes the traveller catches sight, as I myself 
have done in former years, of the huge Greenland 
whale, showing its vast bulk of seventy feet or 
more in some of these sounds or channels. Eigh- 
teen centuries ago it was known as the " British " 
whale, and though it is now a rare visitor to our 
seas, it has not wholly deserted them. 

We will now leave Loch Linnhe behind us, 
thread the Sound of Mull,- and passing Tobermory, 
nestling among its verdure, venture to round " Ard- 
ramurchan's Point." The shelter of Mull failing us, 
we meet again the full strength of the Atlantic 
waves, and nowhere do they seem more formidable. 
As the steamer emerges from the Sound, she has to 
steer so close to the shore that, to use a common 
phrase, we could " throw a biscuit on to the rocks." 
Let a crank or a piston give way, and we should be 
dashed to atoms on that inhospitable coast. 

Half an hour's sail or so brings us to the southern- 
most of those three strangely-named islands — Muck, 
Eigg, and Rum, the " Small Isles," as they are col- 
lectively called. One of these has acquired an evil 
fame, by the well-known tragedy of the Cave of Eigg. 
In this cave, some three hundred and fifty years 
ago, the inhabitants of the island, a haunt of the 
Clan Macdonald, took refuge from an invasion of the 
Macleods of Skye. Some footsteps in the snow 
discovered their retreat. The Macleods lit great 
fires at the mouth of the cave and suffocated all the 



176 The British Seas, 

fugitives. The bones of the victims were to be seen 
less than a hundred years ago. The sight of the 
islands always has reminded me of a story told by 
Hugh Miller of the trouble that followed the disruption 
of the Scottish Church. The landowners in many 
parts were unwilling to sell sites for the new manses, 
and the Free Church minister of Small Isles had to 
reside in a yacht. In fair weather this may have 
been well enough, but as there is no safe anchorage 
in any one of the islands, whenever it came on to 
blow he had to put out to sea.* 

Skye we must pass hurriedly by, though there is 
much to keep us in its scenery, scarcely surpassed 
elsewhere for variety of charm, ranging as it does 
between the soft woodland beauty of Armadale, the 
seat of Lord Macdonald, who claims to represent 
the ancient Lords of the Isles, and the desolate 
grandeur of Loch Corruisk. Sir Walter Scott's 
words, often as they have been quoted before, may 
be given once again : — 

"Stranger, if e'er thine ardent step hath traced 

The northern realms of ancient Caledon, 
Where the proud Queen of Wilderness hath placed 

By lake and cataract her lonely throne, 

Sublime but sad delight thy soul hath known 
Gazing on pathless glen and mountain-height, 

Listing where from the cliffs the torrents thrown 
Mingle their echoes with the eagle's cry, 
And with the sounding lake and with the mourning sky. 

" Such are the scenes where savage grandeur wakes 

An awful thrill that softens into sighs ; 

Such feelings rouse them by dim Bannoch's lakes, 

In Dark Glencoe such gloomy raptures rise : 

Or further, where beneath the northern skies 



The West Coast of Scotland. 179 

Chides wild Loch Eribol his caverns hoar — 

But, be the minstrel judge, they yield the prize 
Of desert dignity to that dread shore, 
That sees grim Coolin rise, and hears Coriskin roar." 

Scarcely less wild and desolate than Corruisk is 
Duntulm Castle on the western coast of the island, 
of which Mr. Pennell gives us a picture. It was 
once the seat of the Lords of the Isles. The story 
is that they were driven from it by a ghost. 
Duntulm is a ruin, but another castle — Dunvegan — 
the seat of the Macleods, is still inhabited. 

The rugged Skye mountains, with their almost 
fantastic shapes, bearing traces, we are told, of 
volcanic origin, should be particularly noted. 
Their special character is continued in the scenery 
of the next land that we reach, Harris, separated 
from Skye by the Sound of Harris, a channel some 
twelve miles broad. Harris, it must be understood, 
forms one island with its northern neighbour, Lewis, 
or The Lews ; but its scenery is wholly different 
— a difference represented, curiously enough, by the 
fact of its belonging to a different county. 1 Tarbert, 
which Mr. Pennell has chosen as the subject of one 
of his illustrations, is one of the many Tarbets, 
scattered over West Scotland. It is the "isthmus," 
which divides from each other the Atlantic and the 
Channel of the Minch. Southern Lewis resembles 
somewhat the bordering region, for its hills are 
lofty and bold. But the character of the island 
quickly changes. The mountains give place to long 
sweeps of moorland, interspersed with innumerable 
1 Harris is in Inverness-shire, Lewis in Ross-shire, 
N 2 



1 8o The British Seas. 

lakes. The height of the hills constantly diminishes 
as we go farther north, till, north of Stornoway, the 
country becomes almost level. The coast-line, how- 
ever, continues to have a certain picturesqueness, 
and the northern promontory of the Lewis, or Butt 
of Lewis, is a noble-looking rock. 

Lewis, though it has little to attract the casual 
visitor, is an interesting island. It is the largest and 
most populous of the dependent islands of the 
British group, and its social condition offers one of 
the most perplexing of problems. Its population 
far exceeds its means of support, even when these 
are supplemented with the earnings of the herring 
fishery. Every rood of available ground has been 
utilized, and yet the population continues to in- 
crease, while it almost refuses to emigrate. I some- 
times think that it presents an epitome of what the 
world will be some thousand years hence — it may be 
less. 1 

But these are too grave matters for the present 

occasion,- and would certainly keep my readers too 

long. Before I part with them I would mention the 

two sights of the island — Callernish, with its so- 

1 The economic history of the island is curious. Some fifty 
years ago Sir James Matheson bought it of the old proprietors, 
the Mackenzies of Seaforth. He laid out a vast sum of money 
on it, after spending at least 30,000/. in the first 'year of his 
ownership in feeding the people. Moor was reclaimed, only to 
fall back into original barrenness, and lochs drained, only to 
add a few more acres of stone and peat to a region which had 
already more than enough. And now the people for whom all 
this money has been spent are so hostile to the proprietor 
(Sir James's widow 1 ! that she has been forced to leave the 
island. 



The West Coast of Scotland. 1S1 

called Druid Circle, inferior only to Stonehenge of 
all that are known in the British Islands, and the 
Sands of Uig, a little bay on the western coast, im- 
mortalized by Mr. Black in his " Princess of Thule." 
The " Princess " the traveller will hardly find, 
though there are many local claimants to the title ; 
but the sands, with the green hills about them and 
the blue sea in the distance, are there in unalterable 
beauty. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE NORTHERN SHORES. 

Sutherlandshire— Cape Wrath — Pentland Firth — Orkney and 
Shetland Isles— Noss Head— Wick — Herring fishing — 
Cromarty and Moray Firths— East Coast from Peterhead 
to East Neuk of Fife. 

In the British Isles no coast is so grandly pic- 
turesque, so full of weird and massive rock scenery, 
as that which faces the great northern seas. The 
northern coast forms a majestic and appropriate 
rampart to a great island, as if Nature herself, with 
a due appreciation of the value of what she has in 
charge, had piled her cliff-towers and fashioned her 
buttressed munitions of rocks so as effectually to 
drive back the most furious onslaughts of her 
fiercest seas. To pass from the graceful charms of 
the western isles and the western shores to the 
rugged shores of the North is to enter a new and 
sterner world. Both nature and man are engaged 
in an almost perpetual warfare. The stress of the 
sea prevails over all. The whole lives of the people 
are devoted to an endless struggle with the deep for 
their very existence, and harbours have been forced 
by art where denied by nature. And yet elements of 
softer beauty and gentler grace are not wanting ; 



The Northern Shores. 183 

and there are times when the storm-battered and 
wave-riven cliffs look down with more than monu- 
mental calm over as peaceful an expanse of sunlit 
ocean as ever smiled to summer skies. 

In summer the west coast of Sutherlandshire is of 
great beauty in colour ; the very air idealizes one and 
lifts one's whole being into happier health. In the 
bight beneath Storr lies graceful, lovely Lochinver ; 
further up run Lochs Cairnbawn, Laxford, and 
Inchard, with seas spreading their arms among the 
high mountains. On high slopes or on low-lying 
stretches of fertile land you may notice, as you 
gently sail along by day, the dots of crofter town- 
ships — brown, thatched patches of civilization in the 
wild wastes, refugees from the madding crowd, with 
their small boats drawn far up from the reach of the 
sea, and by night their peeping lights make the 
coast friendly. The eye wanders over the back- 
ground of the coast — long noble ranges of picturesque 
mountains, that make the craggy promontories of 
Assynt seem afar off. Near Storr the Baddach 
Stack, with arms and legs, and broad shoulders, and 
flowing garments, resembles a preacher ; Queenaig's 
spectral peak, near Kyle-Sku, appears through mists 
which add to the mysterious vagueness : and in the 
Kyle you have to be lively to avoid the changing 
eddies which, ere you know, may smash your boat 
against the rocks. About the host of creeks, lochs, 
and mountain-sides what charms of colour ! what 
sparkling, glowing sunsets ! and, where nature revels 
in tints and hues that defy the painter's brush or the 



184 The British Seas. 

penman's skill, what many-coloured and many-shaped 
clouds are to be seen reflecting the deep rich hues 
from the lochs, and how luminous is the atmosphere 
over all ! The beauty of the sea and its saline 
flavour fill one with rapturous health. Here your 
oars at night lift fire from the sea. 

You approach Cape Wrath. How suggestive the 
name ! how terrible its tragic realities ! Vessels 
steering northward with westerly wind and hazy 
weather are apt to think when they have passed the 
rocky harbour of Loch Laxford they have rounded 
the north-western point of Scotland. Cape Wrath 
springs up from the mainland some six hundred feet 
high, in great masses of broken rocks, with its light- 
house warding off mariners from destruction on the 
cliffs ; and although it is the lot of most of us not to 
see it by day, the ship's convulsive motions afford by 
night sufficient indication of the force of two meeting 
and contending seas about this formidable coast. 
Across this bold precipitous headland, with the 
Lewis as a speck on the horizon, and the Orkneys 
breaking the northern line, and the mountainous 
screens shutting in the south, there breaks the vast 
continual roar and turmoil of the long range of 
northern seas, the Minch and the German Ocean by 
the Pentland Firth (is it not true that in the north 
all natural voices, including the sound of the sea, are 
stronger and louder than in the south ? ), and you 
feel how Cape Wrath merits its name, and how 
wisely mariners give it a wide berth, and do not 
approach land till they reach the Pentland Firth. 



The Northern Shores. 187 

The mention of the Pentland Firth makes a sailor 
knit his brow and consider. Here I should be glad 
to gratify my Rugby canal bargee friend, who con- 
fided to me he should like to go to sea in a real 
herring-boat for a day. What could he make of a 
swirling, eddying tide from the Western Hebrides, 
and the Western Ocean, and the North Seas, which 
at spring tides races at a speed of from four to twelve 
miles an hour, and with such force that when Her 
Majesty's Fleet attempted to pass through in teeth 
of it at Westray all their horse-power engines were 
of no avail, and they had to turn tail ? What would 
he think of this sea where some, on letting go their 
anchor, have had to leave it at the bottom ? How 
could he catch the prime lobster there ? This, the 
eastern gulf-stream of the Atlantic (and when storms 
rage from the south-east, and the tide is running 
in the wind's eye, boats are lost to view in the 
hollow of the majestic waves), is of considerable 
interest, and, as if to add another zest to danger, 
thick fogs come down, accompanied by calms, and 
sometimes it has happened that ships have been then 
carried to Dunnet Bay, while the crew thought 
themselves becalmed in the Firth ! The Pentland 
Firth is a noble scene. The Orkney Isles close in 
the north horizon ; on the western side of the Hoy 
rises the thin rock pillar, and above the Old Man of 
Hoy, the spirit of the storm piercing the air, where 
the entrances and highway are watched by five light- 
houses — Noss, the Skerries, Dunnet Head, Holborn 
Head, and Cape Wrath. From Thurso lies the 



1 88 The British Seas. 

way to Holborn Head. North-eastward we have 
the Bay of Dunnet, with its massive headland, high 
cliffs, and further east the noble headland of Duncan's 
Bay and the famous sands of John o'Groats, where 
the shores are washed by rapid tides from more oceans 
than one, and the sand-beach, rich in peculiar shells 
of great beauty and rarity, is of such spotless chalk- 
like whiteness that it is unequalled except at Tiree 
in the Outer Hebrides. In favourable weather fleets 
of ships and boats innumerable pass this great 
highway from the east and west of our island, the 
large liners looking like dots from the high cliffs. 
To hear the terrible voice of the sea here in storm is 
to carry it in our ears for ever. It is not a place to 
nurse day-dreaming ; one cannot moon about in the 
presence of great rocks and cliffs, great seas and 
great views ; they all make their presence felt, and 
keep you wide awake. Here the British Seas, the 
vast world of great waters, are, whether in calm or 
in storm, most majestic. 

But it is possible to pass even the Pentland 
Firth without sign of danger. One evening in 
August I crossed the Firth from Scrabster to 
Scapa ; the sea was calm as a lake, the sultry 
night fell fast, and made the Orkney Isles, as we 
with many gliding turns approached, seem like 
ethereal scenes in dreamland, where lights — humble 
cottage lights, no doubt — on spectral isles sparkled 
so kindly, and the islanders' flit-boats, now and 
again shooting out so unexpectedly and so quietly 
from projecting points, seemed to row from the 



The Northern Shores. 189 

unknown. A message or parcel was delivered, or 
a passenger stepped down the ship-ladder, and the 
oarsmen lifted their voices, as they did their oars, 
gently, and departed peacefully into the midsummer 
night's drowsy islands ; and early on Sunday 
morning one almost thought he was in Arcady, not 
in Orkney. One would not have been surprised to 
have then and there had sight of " Proteus rising 
from the sea, or heard old Triton blow his wreathed 
horn." 

One thinks at North Ronaldshay of the Armada 
ship that struck there, and one may trace to this 
day among the islanders a touch and dash of 
Spanish blood and beauty, and find in the gorgeous 
Spanish colours of their knittings the tradition of a 
warmer clime. About contented, happy Orkney, 
where all fowls, from statistics, seem to lay eggs, 
not much need be said : Kirkwall, a smart town, 
with its solitary tree ; Stromness, out of the world, 
with its houses built endways beyond the water-mark, 
protected by bulwarks and quays and with doors 
opening into the sea — some say, to make the art of 
smuggling easier ; Hoy Head, which natives believe 
to be a profile likeness of Scott — a proof of their 
vivid imagination and warmth of affection for the 
author of the " Pirate " ; and the Isle of Hoy, with 
yellow and red cliffs, as if the sun shone on them 
always, and the flat cultivated fields. Orkney is 
well-to-do, and makes no claim on your sympathies, 
nor do the folk on the seas. 

From Stromness we sailed in the paddle-steamer, 



190 The British Seas. 

St. Magnus, which pitched and tossed to a merry 
tune, and in the early morning crept up, in the 
midst of dense fog, the west coast of Shetland, so 
far that the captain thought we had done our 
journey : he waited till the fog lifted, and when the 
sun shone later we were just at our destination 
outside Scalloway, so well do these captains steer. 
Ultima Thule, Shetland, the land of Udallers, the 
birthplace of sailors, of superstitious fishermen, a 
strange, wild land of stacks and skerries, voes and 
gios, of whales and ponies, of Pictish castles, and 
caves and sea-trows (mermaids), where men fish and 
women work, the home of the Aurora Borealis, 
which carries the gorgeousness of sunset into the 
night and gives the dawn on the sea an opaline 
radiance. The sea is the Shetlander's home and 
provider, and, alas ! but too often his grave — the 
sad home of a sad race. In the wilds of these isles 
one drinks in the spirit of the sea, and its deep 
voicefulness fills the air. The sea reigns over all, 
and asserts its interest or influence over every 
household, and hardly a cottage but the sea takes 
toll out of. Treeless, gardenless, fieldless, the salt sea 
pervades the whole islands, and the dull grey over- 
shadows both folk and land. The weird and the 
picturesque is the prevailing mark of these hundred 
odd islands — these Scotlands out of Scotland — so 
rugged, and irregular as if the sea had torn them 
asunder. Some of the outlying rocks seem to keep 
continual w T atch, and there are the drongs out at sea 
that are so like fishing-boats with empty sails that 




Shaking the Nets. From an etching by Colin Hunter, A.R.A. 



The Northern Shores. 193 

we might almost think they were the product of 
some miraculous process of petrifaction. The coast 
to the north and north-west surpasses anything in 
Britain in grandeur. The mighty cliffs of Foula, 
1300 feet high — the beautiful pillars and caves of 
Papa Stour — the contorted fantastic rocks at Hills- 
wick — the Sumburgh Head, with its bare scalp and 
side to the surge from the Roost — the skerries, 
arches, and tunnels in every island — the most 
fantastic shapes and figures of the rocks, the 
interlacing of lochs with mainland as in friendly 
grasp ; and over all is the great deep blue sea, 
with patches of vivid green from the shore, and a 
fringe of brown rocks and dashing foam. Whether 
they like it or not, the law of nature makes the 
natives, for love of their lives, know all the sunk 
reefs and tides as you know your own house ; and 
in their large six'erns (six-oared boats, prow-built 
at both ends) the waves bound beneath them as 
horses that know their riders, and the same spirit 
takes these pensive toilers of the deep yearly to 
the whale-fishing in winter, or in spring sends them 
in smacks to Iceland and the Faroe Islands in 
pursuit of fishing. These islands amid the melan- 
choly main witness the most sublime, raging, 
terrific storms, when woe betide the boat that is 
not at home. At the Skerry of Eshaness, with its 
steep precipices, is a refuge for myriads of kitti- 
wakes, and their shrill cries accord with the wild 
sea-roar ; waves tumble and bellow from the 
Atlantic on the west or North Sea on the east, like 



194 The British Seas. 

sea-monsters with their manes streaming in the 
wind, till in the blindness of their rage they dash 
with great crashes against the trembling rocks, and 
send their foam-fringed sheets of water so far inland 
as to keep the country moist and render the springs 
brackish. The unlimited power of the sea is 
witnessed at Grind of the Navir, where enormous 
boulders are tossed ashore, and at Fitful Head 
(scene of the " Pirate "), where the constant surge 
escarps the rocks into fantastic cliffs pierced by 
long twilight caves ; and at Muckle Flugga, where 
the northernmost lighthouse on our seas is, and 
where the keepers are often imprisoned by stress of 
weather. Go to Lerwick, with its bay for a natural 
harbour, and during the fishing season there are 
boats from all nations and a babel of tongues — 
Dutch booms and luggers, Swedish boats standing 
high and well out of the sea, Manx deep-sea boats, 
Belfast smack-like boats, not to speak of their 
English and Scottish rivals — all fishing the great 
northern waters. See the boats leaving Bressay 
Sound for the sea with an east wind — it is a pretty 
sight — each boat with its crew pulling out from its 
fish-curing quarters till they catch the breeze, then 
up go their fore-sails as they dip and bend to 
the breeze, up go the jigger-sail and jibs, and away 
they career like greyhounds round the Sound head ; 
now you see the sails, then the tops, and at last 
they race out of sight. Here the summer days are 
nightless. The witching hour of night is replaced 
in early winter by the brilliancy of the " Merry 



The Northern Shores. 195 

Dancers " which spread out in every direction like 
the evolutions of a great army, whose cohorts are 
gleaming in more than purple and gold, dispersing 
now and now combining, and now waning and 
disappearing, and again rushing into sight with the 
sound as of hurtling arrows, till at last they slip 
with mysterious evanescence from the grasp of both 
eyesight and imagination, and leave behind a sky 
of brassy yellow and green, into which the sun 
gradually creeps as an alien presence. 

Returning south, passing Fair Isle, looming in 
the dark between Orkney and Shetland, we sight 
on the mainland Noss Head, a corner by itself, 
with its striking blue mass of terribly rugged rocks 
rising perpendicular out of the sea, tenanted by 
birds and the lighthouse-keeper guarding the 
approach. Noss guards the entrance to noble 
Sinclair's Bay, where bright shining sands are a 
striking feature. Rocks rise unbroken for miles. 
A few miles to the north, and off Canisbay, the 
formidable Merry Men of Mey — so called from the 
continual exultation of the dancing, leaping waves : 
though mirth and dancing, says an old author, be 
far from the minds of the sea when any sea is going. 
About Duncansbay Head the rock scenery is grand : 
the brown towering cliffs, some rugged like uncut 
leaves of a book, others etched in alternate lines of 
cornice and frieze ; and narrow caves, with pillars, 
aisles, and groined roofs, and wash of sea, making 
music for ever. Nowhere around the coast do the 
rocks spring from the sea with such majesty, or so 

O 2 



196 The British Seas. 

impressive with strength and splendour. Between 
Noss and Wick you observe the action of the sea 
on the cliffs ; the wild waves, it is true, make no 
apparent impression on the solid blue sandstone of 
Noss, but the little creeks, so numerous along this 
coast, are gradually widening, and there are every- 
where evidences of that gradual encroachment of 
the sea which time records. One other geological 
phenomenon : these cliffs, with thousands of ledges, 
and of isolated stacks with bridge-like connexions — 
how do you account for their marvellous formation, 
the beauty of their lines, or for the presence of so 
many shelves which the Solan goose inhabits ? 
Ailsa Craig and the Bass Rock, the Haddington and 
Berwick coasts, are other equally fine examples of 
the action of the vast universal force of marine 
denudation. 

In the deep seas here you may pretty suddenly fall 
upon the finest sea-sight at night — that is, a great 
fleet of fishing-boats riding at their nets, with their 
globe-shaped lights, mast-high, breaking the dark- 
ness at curiously regular intervals. Herring-boats 
are the swallows of the deep, proclaiming summer is 
at hand, and they speed like the birds over the waves. 
You pass them as you approach the great fishing 
coast of Caithness and the harbour of Wick, with its 
forest of masts, its ancient and fish-like smells, its 
sea-wealth in the large curing stations. The traffic 
of the sea from Shetland to here, and for hundreds of 
miles down the coast, is maintained almost entirely 
by these homely, smart herring-boats ; the clean 




"" 5 > ;'><?•". •i.-vl. 




, ;ti- 



? r#£ 



Pl% 'V-x' 



The Northern Shores. 1 99 

sailing-boats keep continually crossing — you cannot 
get out of their sight — and their brown sails and 
homely rigging and modest decks become likeable, 
associated as they are with great labouring lives, 
bold enterprise, sudden risks of rise and fall in 
markets, hopes and fears of wives and little ones on 
land, losses from calms and from storms, from 
failures of fishing and from failures arising from 
excessive productive fishing. It is spirit-stirring to 
see the streaming flow of herring-boats, sail after 
sail in long continuous lines, approaching the har- 
bour from the sea ; fresh sails spring up by magic 
long after you think all have arrived. What a game 
of pitch-and-toss it is ! Some boats you see labour- 
ing hard, overladen to danger from a great catch ; 
their neighbours got but little ; and on the braes 
overlooking the harbour the wives stand up against 
the sky-line, gesticulating and speculating over the 
boats and catches, and a long way off identifying 
them by their rigging as they return homewards 
with their " shots." 

The steamer sails from Wick to Aberdeen in the 
open sea, out of sight of the long stretch of rocky 
coast to Lybster, where, and at Sarclet and 
Whaligoe the natural creeks among the giddy height 
of rocks are utilized as harbours ; and these romantic 
shelters, which served as lurking-places for piratical 
Vikings and smuggling Norsemen, are now usefully 
employed by the sturdy crofter fishermen, and in 
season are alive with the stir of coasting ships, coal- 
sloops, and herring-fishing boats. The eyes leap 



2 oo The British Seas. 

with delight on the waving trees that spring into 
sight at ducal Dimrobin ; faint and dim in the dis- 
tance is old Tain and the sandy mouth of the 
Dornoch Firth — unsafe and shallow haven, abhorred 
by cods and seamen. 

Morayshire is like a blur on the vista and streaks 
of light at night ; the bold Souters of Cromarty 
guide us into the leg-like Bay of Cromarty, about 
the finest roadstead in the world, where the whole 
fleet might safely ride, and Balnagown Castle gleams 
from sheltering woods. All the way up to Ding- 
wall the eye rests on a varied and rich tapestry, 
changeful and exceedingly beautiful, which, after 
the bolder scenery, approaches the idyllic. One 
with a mania for firth and sea scenery will be here 
satiated by seas and shores ; the stretching blue 
hills, never free of clouds, seascape at every turn of 
shore, the quiet life of the Ferries — so full of sunlight 
and shadows, like Celtic natures — still villages, and 
overhanging woods. The long recesses, the well- 
tilled fields, keep smiling on the sailor with joy 
about the Moray Firth, with Beauly's sheltered bay 
of little interest, clean Nairn, Burgh Head, putres- 
cent of fish, like all fishing towns, and supposed to 
be the Ultimatum P tor or ton of the Romans. The 
trip by rail looking seawards brings out the bril- 
liancy of the Firth's panoramic windings probably 
better than from the ship, and if you have a love 
for the picturesque in land or sea you will at once 
resolve to spend a holiday here before you die. 
One's heart warms on returning from the grey 



^^■' iiiJWihi 







M 



^-m> ' \ 



The Northern Shores. 203 

serrated coast and dark skerries of the northern 
shores to the fertile fields aglow in summer with 
ripening grain, the grateful fringe of swishing trees, 
the deep colour of the soil, the cosy towns along 
the Morayshire coast. The fishing towns between 
here and Peterhead are numerous and enterprising 
— Buckie, Portsoy, Cullen, Banff, Macduff, Rose- 
hearty, Fraserburgh — whose reliance is placed on 
the stormy seas, and not the barren earth, for sub- 
sistence. They are fishing towns and nothing more 
— grimy, fishy, picturesque, though dirty, with odd, 
quaint figures lounging about odd, quaint boats at 
odd, quaint harbours, where the boats' brown hulls 
and spars send ruddy reflections on the lapping 
waters, which are green under the boats' shadows. 
There one may observe the vast influence the cap- 
ture of fish has on communities ; all the towns 
thrive or starve by the herring fishing ; all the 
natives, from the Provosts downwards, hold shares 
in the fishing-boats ; and from the very aspect of 
the streets you can judge the success or failure of 
the great seas' harvest. No British seas are so 
inseparably associated with the toilers of the deep 
as are the great Northern seas, where fishing-boats 
are ever to be seen tossing about. 

Southward we pass in rapid rotation Peterhead, 
with its red granite houses, its boats of steel, and 
its men with heads of iron, with its Hell's Lum 
ever at hand ; small fishing ports, where from the 
road you can gaze down the fishermen's cottage 
chimneys and peep into their kail-pots ; little fish- 



204 The British Seas. 

ing hamlets, boldly perched on the top of rocks 
almost all the way southwards ; the weird Bullers 
of Buchan, which keep their weirdness in sunshine 
as in gloom, and make you agree with Dr. Johnson 
that you would sooner send your greatest enemy to 
reside in the Red Sea than in this unearthly caldron ; 
and from the sea are seen the shining spires, and 
towers, and crowns of grey Aberdeen, and in the 
distance its isolated Black Dog. Next comes pic- 
turesque Stonehaven (Steenhive of its native doric) 
with part of its folk huddled close on the sea-rim, 
and the modern villa offshoots perched on the braes ; 
and the crumbling Castle of Dunnottar, whose 
hoary antiquity seems an infant's breath compared 
with the illimitable past recorded in its wonderful 
cliffs, built up of the stones that rolled themselves 
smooth in the wash of primeval seas ; then little 
Bervie, rendered historical by its dearth of guid ale 
when its Provost drank water ; the peaceful pastoral 
hill of Garvock, where in days of yore the diabolical 
lairds of the neighbourhood tasted the " broo " of 
the Laird of Gardenstone boiled to death in a 
caldron in too literal fulfilment of their royal 
master's wrathful wish. 

Montrose lies flat as a platter, with the sea like a 
smiling canal lapping at its garden walls — this when 
no storm is on ; for then the marshalled waves no- 
where show grander front of battle than as they 
advance on the downs of Montrose ; next we have 
Arbroath, with its red sandstone in cathedral and 
cottage — quaint, full of odd ways and character 



The Northern Shores. 205 

study ; straggling, interesting Carnoustie rejoicing 
in its excellent golfing links and great sandy beach, 
where ladies innumerable bathe, unblessed and un- 
hampered by bathing-coaches ; and then we pass 
the mouth of the Tay (where we hear what sailors 
call the Roaring Lion), smiling and laughing under 
its halo of smoke from " Bonnie Dundee," as if it 
had not forgotten the joy of its earlier existence 
amid the most charming landscapes that Scotland 
can show. The hills lie silent in the distance, big 
steamers throb their way with labouring pulsations, 
and with gay sheets hauled close, and gunwales 
heeled over and touching the hissing foam, boats 
skim merrily all day long. Brilliant St. Andrews, 
sparkling as with jewels in sunshine, where John 
Knox toiled in a French galley ; the Bell Rock 
Lighthouse, recalling the story of the malignant 
and well-rewarded pirate, and the serrated coast of 
the East Neuk of Fife, alive with memories of many 
a fatal shipwreck and many a deed of lifeboat 
daring ; and now before us lies the mouth of the 
Firth of Forth, with the Isle of May sending by 
night its glow of orange fire into the heart of the 
darkness of vast wild waves, and slashing rain, and 
driving hurricane of east wind. Once, with several 
bottles of rum, we came to the isle to spend two or 
three days, to make acquaintance with the Forth 
pilots who perch here, but no pilots appeared. 
Here let us cast anchor, and visit a fisherman's 
cottage. 

The interior of a fisherman's house is worth see- 



2o6 The British Seas. 

ing. You find crockery, wall-ornaments, and bits of 
pictures that are nowhere else to be seen ; they re- 
flect the simple taste and peculiar idiosyncrasies of 
the fisher folk. The huge well-filled bed, with heavy 
curtains, though stuffy, looks decidedly inviting, and 
made to remain in, as it is difficult to get in or out of ; 
you often surprise a fisherman resting there during 
the day, and as he rises on his elbow reproduces the 
picture of the poor wayfarer, and his wife that of the 
good Samaritan. In front of the bed, as a seat, is 
the husband's chest, holding his Sunday clothes. 
Above the dresser or kitchen table and on the plate- 
rack are ranged in rows dinner plates of various 
makes and colours, and hung round the beams on 
nails are milk jugs, all in pairs : I have counted in 
one house as many as a dozen different patterns. 
These plates and jugs are not for ordinary daily use, 
but for the picturesque ornamentation of their walls. 
On the mantelpiece and on shelves are many stone- 
ware figures, brilliantly coloured, generally Portobello 
ware, representing shepherds and shepherdesses in 
Arcadian guise, sailors and their sweethearts in 
everlasting embrace, Burns and Highland Mary, the 
Babes in the Wood, and Napoleon and the Prince 
Consort, with underneath appropriate snatches of 
poetry, and Delf dogs in the very picture of health 
and gorgeous hues look contentedly down. There are 
pictures, such as Raising the Widow of Nain's son, 
a shipwreck and the rescuing lifeboat, and a cheap 
print of the Queen — and in a window corner the 



The Northern Shores. 207 

family are photographed, the men in working garb, 
the women carrying creels on their backs, all justly 
proud of their calling. In the corner stands the 
antique well-filled corner cupboard, containing their 
best tea set, used on high days and family gather- 
ings. Stout antique brass candlesticks set off the 
ends of the mantelpiece. Each house has its 
framed memoriam cards of those who have been 
drowned. Sometimes they possess an inner apart- 
ment — "the room " — with another huge bed, and a 
substantial chest of drawers with spiral pillars. A 
large family Bible is placed on the table, covered 
with a crimson cloth ; and on the hearthstone is a 
home-made many-coloured rug. In the garret and 
about the kitchen are stowed away nets and fish- 
ing gear. Round fish creels, and long shallow 
creels with coils of lines resting on beds of fresh- 
cut grass, each line with a hundred or so of hooks 
baited with bits of bright-coloured sand-w r orm or 
glistening clam, lie about the house or the door 
ready for the goodman (as the husband is called) 
going to the sea. 

All along this eastern coast you must bluffly face 
the blast that comes raw as whiskey and keen as a 
razor. The assertive east wind braces one up if it 
does not make the blood thin ; you must stand up 
to it, and learn to brag of the rasping wind that 
keeps the eastern shores cool, that endows you with 
ruddy health, and makes the natives as boisterous 
as the breeze. In these fishing towns you should 



208 The British Seas. 

hear it in spring, singing its own praises to many a 
pretty tune, which it does in no pickthank manner, 
but with a right hearty goodwill and merry gusto. 
This whistling, piercing wind is the making of the 
east-coast fishermen, aye, and of more than them. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE FIRTH OF FORTH. 

Great thoroughfare — The Fife coast — The Haddington coast— 
Bait-gatherers —Oyster-dredging song — Fishermen's love 
for sea — Tragedies — Berwickshire coast — Northumberland 
coast. 

The Firth of Forth (of old called the Scots' 
Sea) is the greatest sea thoroughfare and has prob- 
ably the most beautiful panorama of sea-scenery 
in Scotland. On both sides the Firth is made 
majestic with the presence of great hills. All 
sorts and conditions of vessels ply on the pic- 
turesque waters : brown-sailed fishing-boats up the 
Firth dredging for clams or fishing for crabs and 
haddocks, tacking and dodging about all day long ; 
the deep-sea boats, in their season, speeding out in 
leaps and bounds, as if aware of the distance to 
the sea and eager to reach their destination, their 
brown sails, wind-taut, bending to the breeze with 
easy, sweeping grace ; see how they race in friendly 
emulation, and are now lost to view behind the 
green islands. The hulking steamers plough the 
sea by sheer strength, leaving behind dense circular 
volumes of smoke, which, revolving into curls and 

P 



2 /o The British Seas. 

then into streaks, dissipate in specks into thin air. 
When an east wind blows sharp, and breaks the 
deep blue Firth into white-ridged waves, you find 
amusement in forecasting home-coming steamers by 
the smoke blown ahead of them on the horizon : — 
you speculate from which port they have come, 
whether from Iceland or Shetland or Norway ; from 
Danish ports, Hamburgh or Rotterdam ; from Hull 
or from London. I have heard old wives from 
inland farms wondering what sort of folk are on 
board, where they came from, where and what they 
are going to do — questions that come naturally to 
the Scots. Handsome schooners resplendent in the 
glory of sails full set, move eloquently up the Firth. 
Jersey smacks (all smacks are called Jersey smacks, 
wherever they sail from, as the first smacks came 
here from Jersey) and brigs sail in old-fashioned 
leisure style, with old-fashioned airs, and one would 
think for the observer's pleasure, so stately do they 
look in last-century make and rigging. The Pride 
has regularly run with potatoes from Dunbar to 
London for thirty years — isn't that something for a 
boat to be proud of? 

This sea thoroughfare has, like any street 
thoroughfare, its prowlers, its loafers, and its leisure 
class. The former you have in the pert steam 
trawlers, the bugbears of fishermen, which keep 
rushing out and in, to and from the three-mile limit, 
with their catches. The leisure class you have in 
yachts with clean sails, to distinguish them un- 
necessarily from fishing-boats, careering about in an 



The Firth of Forth. 2 1 1 

aimless, amateurish way. Pilot-boats cruise about, 
and on signal from a schooner race and chase for 
their prize like greyhounds from the slips. To these 
ships, to the sailors, to fishermen wayfarers, to all 
alike, the sea or the Firth has no favourite, makes 
no difference ; but at times one might think, as he 
looks with one eye on the harbours and the other 
eye on the sea, that the refulgent splendour of the sun, 
and the charms of the wind and weather, love to dwell 
with the fisherman's modest boat, his simple dress, 
his patched sails, and that the ardour of the breeze 
loves to blow and whistle and grow merry among 
these sails and puff them out, and send them home 
dancing over the waves with gladness, and leave the 
statelier and heavier ships groaning and creaking far 
behind. This great thoroughfare, this sea scene, is 
never vacant : like the sea it is never at rest ; there is 
a continual traffic on this highway of life and com- 
merce. The inner Firth and the stretch of sea is 
never dull ; if there is not a coming and going of 
boats and vessels — and their absence presages great 
storms — there is the majesty of the mighty waters, 
the play of clouds and sunshine on the sea, making 
them everlastingly interesting in changing hues and 
tones and forms : the mind of man seeing in them 
whatever the imagination suggests ; and there is the 
company of sea birds on the shore or on the sea, 
darting about in their white feathers like specks of 
sunshine, with their sad monotonous calls, like echoes 
and cries from the crested sea-waves. This 
thoroughfare is set in a striking frame. The king- 

p 2 



2 i 2 The British Seas. 

dom of Fife looks southwards on the hazy seaboard 
hills and Laws and rich fields of the Lothians, and 
they smile on the clearer northern shores of Fife, the 
nestling fishing towns like red dots on grey shores ; 
and the shores keep smiling on each other. The 
rocky shores, the Gothic and Norman church spires 
peeping above cosy villages with warm, red-tiled 
roofs, the ancient castles standing on prominences, 
the undulating golf links ; the bold presences of the 
green islands breaking the view and sheltering the 
ships, the Bass Rock, bolt upright with white sides 
smiling to the sun and the sea, the Isle of May, a 
sentinel by day and a lighthouse by night, the Laws 
or conical hills on both sides, the Paps of the 
Lomonds towering high in Fife, the shoulders of the 
Lammermuirs rounding off the Haddington coast, 
the Pentlands up the firth like clouds, and wrought 
as into this scroll-work Arthur's Seat amid the smoke 
from Auld Reekie and the Port o' Leith. At night 
the lighthouses proclaim the unwearied care for this 
highway ; the villages shed sparkling lights sea- 
wards ; and the steamers, with blazes of light, keep 
up the ceaseless traffic that makes eloquent our 
British seas. 

From the Isle of May up the Forth, on both sides, 
are upwards of forty piers and tidal harbours, road- 
steads, and sheltered anchorages. Looking up the 
Forth from the May is one of the finest seascapes ; 
and should the eastern harr blot out the sights, you 
have always trawlers, which shelter and prowl about, 
and the ways of birds here to study. Along the Fife 



The Firth of Forth. 2 1 3 

coast you notice the happy device of man in having 
built the parish churches on heights and added 
Dutch-like spires, so that they stand out as guides 
to the mariners, and thus their influence is not con- 
fined to their parish. All that mariners know of 
these towns is that good water and moderate 
supplies can be obtained, and fishing-boats ride 
jauntily all day long. All the towns have good 
harbours, some the oldest to be seen ; and, strange 
to say, beacons lit at night are in some cases shown 
from the brae-heads above the harbour, and not 
from the harbours. These towns are the places one 
can spend a week to profit in studying the ways of 
fisher-folk, their superstitions, their nick-names, and 
how, to be identified, some have to adopt their wives' 
names ; the characteristic interiors of their houses, 
which they effectively decorate with Delf dogs, and 
jugs, and crockery; the rise and fall of fishing, the effect 
of trawlers and trawling. At Anstruther for three con- 
tinuous days hawkers with their vans from far inland 
hung on at the harbour in the bare hope of some 
native boats having to run home with a catch from 
the herring-fishing at Aberdeen by stress of weather, 
but their prayers for a north-east storm were un- 
answered. The towns and villages all run in narrow 
lines, with steep and narrow streets, reel-rail, ram- 
stam houses, built in a Fifish, independent, queer, odd 
manner, with tortuous bends and turns, displaying 
the character of the folk, with foot-roads where 
none could be expected, gardens in front of their 
houses to the sea-shore, and open to the public- 



2 1 4 The British Seas. 

What strange oddities of houses ! what character 
in buildings and through-otherness ! Where no 
links are to dry nets on, the witted natives have 
erected posts on the beach, and at East Wemyss you 
see clothes drying from clothes-posts in the sea, which 
runs right up to the houses, and at W r est Wemyss 
a coalpit-mouth opens into the harbour. Out of 
this coalpit-mouth you see at night appearing, as if 
by magic, scores of tidy, clean factory girls busy 
knitting — the result of a cunning old footpath 
alongside the beach and cutting along the pit-mouth. 
These tumble-towns, with odd designs and 
life, remind you of Devonshire. Crail at the one 
end, Kinghorn at the other, and the intervening 
towns on the sea — Anstruther, Cellardyke, Pitten- 
weem, St. Monance, Elie, Largo, the Wemyss, 
Buckhaven, Dysart, and Kirkcaldy — all are choke- 
full of the picturesque, old-world feeling, old-world 
folk, and old-world buildings, where evening shades 
clothe the seascapes with poetry, and make poor 
odd buildings poetical in the moonlight, and the 
huddled, projecting, receding, falling and rising 
house-tops and gable-ends like the homes of fancy, 
and the salmon stake-nets like huge spider-webs, 
the boats drawn up on the links like monsters of 
the deep, and the fishermen about the harbours like 
heroes in romance — whereas they are heroes in fact. 
As you sail along you come upon one red-tiled fish- 
ing town the moment you leave the other, so close 
are they together ; and this you will the more 
readily notice as the sun shines on the red tiles and 
white gables, and a cloud travels and wipes out the 



■^ ■'-•-•; w- 



^fe^^fe 



>'<• 







Village near Frazerburgh. Drawn by J. Pennell. 



The Firth of Forth, 2 1 7 

warm light and leaves in succession all the villages 
in sombre grey. Sunshine and shade make fine 
studies ; the sun shines on houses or sea, and they 
return the greeting; in shade they have the sym- 
pathy of the folk who look on them always in shade. 
A quiet, tender, grey beauty, with brilliant glimpses, 
hangs on the Fife coast, and the wanderer along 
the variegated scenery of bluff coasts, glass caves, 
curious rocks, fine bays and towns, listening to the 
voice of the sea made manifest in the harbours, 
soon becomes in sympathy with the " racy " folk 
from whom the prototype of Robinson Crusoe 
sprang, and where many an autotype lies dormant. 
It is no stretch on one's imagination to see Largo's 
ancient harbour formed by a pier of rough stones on 
the east, and rocks marked by warping posts on the 
west, and think of Selkirk's twice sudden departure 
from his home ; its smell would put to flight many 
a good man with not too fastidious olfactory organs. 
How like a man, a Fife fisherman, was Selkirk, who 
alone is honoured by a public monument on this 
seaboard — the first time he left Largo was to run off 
to sea, the last was with a native girl. The observer 
along this seaboard will never question the actuality 
of Robinson Crusoe ; he would be quite prepared 
to hear that every town laid claim to being his 
nativity, romance and daring run so strong in the 
Fifeshire fishermen's veins. 

Along the Haddington coast you observe for the 
first time in these northern shores that the wealth 
of the folks is drawn from generous soil, and that 



2 1 8 The British Seas. 

the. harbours are neither numerous nor good. The 
glow of the sea is over the red soil, the red sand- 
stone houses, and the red roof-tiles. The atmo- 
sphere is clarified, wide awake, and the keen breeze 
keeps one's thoughts revolving. The fields are 
ploughed, and the teams come to the footpath which 
follows the edge of the coast, and thus those who 
plough the sea, and those who plough the land, look 
upon each other. The one sees the vessel change 
her tack, the other sees the plough turning at the 
end of the furrow. On the grass-covered rocky 
ridges at bright Canty Bay (so inseparably asso- 
ciated with Sam Bough, R.S.A.) the sheep browse 
and skip like goats. Between the Bass and the 
May a sea-fight, five centuries ago, took place be- 
tween the Scotch and English, when an English 
admiral and three ships were captured. 

" The battle fiercely it was fought 
Near to the craig of Bass ; 
When we next fight the English loons, 
May nae waur come to pass." 

Probably Dunbar, with its harbour — which 
tradition says was built by Cromwell— is the most 
picturesque in the Firth, with ruins of its once- 
important castle for a figure-head at its entrance, 
where Paul Jones and Captain Fall, the sea adven- 
turers, made their presence felt ; and the old sur- 
rounding buildings make one feel that something 
should happen. So do the fishermen who "loaf" 
about the shadow of the boats, cluster on winter 
nights in a coalshed, and crowd under high stone 




bfl 

< 

s 

o 



The Firth of Forth. 2 2 1 

walls, and put off going to sea. To them the deep 
sea has little interest ; it has lost its romance. 
Time was when shoals of herring-boats (as many as 
five hundred) were to be found here ; now they are 
content with small boats and small ambition, and 
happy with having an easy time. So strong is the 
fishermen's dislike against the trawlers, that they do 
not themselves trawl or dredge, but fish with hook 
and line. Dunbar fishermen, like others, are 
terribly disinclined to venture into the open sea. 
If it is a stormy day, it is too strong for their boats ; 
if it is a good day, they will go out for crabs and 
haddocks. Yet fishermen further up the Firth come 
racing past, and take from their mouths the bread 
those Dunbar fishermen should be earning. Some 
philosophers find an explanation in the rocky- 
mouthed harbour, a regular boat-trap — the jaws of 
death on a stormy day — and so will reason that men 
of enterprise will seek safer harbour, and thus it is 
left for degenerate fishermen to remain ; but these 
men are, after all, brave sailors. Dunbar once 
owed much of its prosperity to the perilous industry 
of its fishermen, who have a society of their own 
dating back to 1706. It was once the centre of 
successful herring-fishing, but the old places that in 
days of yore were burghers' residences, and banks, 
and shipping offices, are now fishermen's dwellings, 
militia stores, and public-houses. Looking down 
old closes on a sunny day, with whitewashed w r alls, 
bright red tiles, and the deep blue ocean beyond, is 
as looking upon a Union Jack. High stands the 



222 The British Seas. 

parish church, catching the fisherman's eye far at 
sea. The fishermen at one general election were 
told by pot-house politicians that if they voted for 
one candidate, who would disestablish the Church, 
when they were drowned at sea and their bodies 
brought on shore, they would not receive decent 
Christian burial ; that the church would be pulled 
down, the ancient landmark would be gone, and 
they would have no guide for the harbour. This 
fallacy was exposed by opposing politicians, but the 
simple-minded fishermen shook their heads and said, 
" We ken fine what ye want." Further east is the 
Cove, where sea and mountains meet in enduring 
embrace in a rock-bound coast. The harbour, 
almost concealed, has been tunnelled out of a cliff 
with its entrance to the sea on the east. This little 
community has gone into mourning since the sad 
storm in October, 1881, which overwhelmed a 
number of its boats and the flower of its fishermen ; 
so great was the loss and terrible the shock, that not 
till this day have the survivors recovered the strength 
of courage to venture into the deep-sea fishing. 

Graceful, handsome, beautiful North Berwick, 
with its tidy harbour and handful of fishing people, 
gives one the impression that, whatever it might 
have been in the past, the harbour is now mainly a 
thing of beauty and a picturesque adjunct to amuse 
the summer visitors, and that the fishermen stand 
in the same position, and are stowed away into an 
old granary, whither they are driven by the inun- 
dations of visitors from the city. It is odd to see 



S f-'v 







The Firth of Forth. 225 

broad fishermen, with blue jerseys and red cravats, 
with braces where no braces should be seen, carry- 
ing golf-clubs on the links, their only plea being that 
the fishing is " done," thanks to the trawlers. 
They live in hopes of better times, and by amusing 
the summer visitors. Here the colours and beauty 
of nature fascinate — the splendid sanded beach and 
grassy links, with their winding undulations, the 
blue sea broken by the eye-filling Bass and the 
smaller islands, grim and grey Tantallon Castle 
towering on the high cliffs, and the bright northern 
air making warm the red sandstone houses and you 
ruddy with healthy glow. The Bass Rock with its 
solan geese, its ruinous prison, is well worth visit- 
ing, as its history of the lives and deaths of Scot's 
politicians and Scot's preachers is a miniature his- 
tory of Scotland. Next are Port Seton and Cock- 
enzie, excellent types of fishing villages — the fisher- 
men's houses, which are modern and belong to 
themselves, are of small villa style, with con- 
veniences. Here the men are steady and enter- 
prising and proud of their calling, which they prose- 
cute with success in their deep-sea boats. In the 
beginning of June you will find them in the south of 
Ireland. They return home in July, and go to the 
west or north of Scotland, and north of England, 
where they remain till September. They next go 
south to Lowestoft in October, and are only back 
again to hold their New Year. They take to the 
sea as they take to their religion, with keen gusto ; 
religious views are their hobby, and all the sects in 

Q 



226 The British Seas. 

the world are to be found preached with zeal by the 
Cockenzie fishermen. It is a treat to come across a 
fisherman here who is not a preacher, and who will 
not tell you your destiny in five or ten minutes. He 
is an ideal modern democrat, with little or no 
superstition, little or no picturesqueness in life, but 
an excellent fisherman. Then there is Prestonpans, 
one of the oldest Scottish fishing villages, half 
asleep, harbourless, almost deserted by its fishermen. 
The sea has made such inroads that it beats now 
against the backs of houses. The quaint houses, 
with stone outside stair-steps terribly worn, and 
low-roofed rooms, are characteristic of the place. 
In front of the fishermen's pew in the church hangs 
an oil painting representing boats at sea, with ap- 
propriate quotation from the Psalms around the 
frame — the only painting that hangs in any Presby- 
terian church in Scotland. 

The most picturesque figures all along the coast 
are the bait-gatherers. In the early morning still- 
ness, when one, after bathing, is resting behind the 
shadow of a rock, the air is broken by distant voices, 
sounding like sea-birds ; the sounds come nearer — 
you make them out to be human voices by the 
peculiar sharp click ; afar off are troops of figures 
rapidly approaching on the sands, the sounds 
articulate into words, and the baiters pass with 
steady swinging pace that would do any man 
credit. They are going for " lugworm " bait for 
white fishing, which lasts till September (clam bait 
is only got in May) ; it is the sweetest and best 



The Firth of Forth. 227 

bait, and is generally got in greatest number 
where sand and mud mix, as at Musselburgh or on 
the great stretches of sand at Aberlady, or at the 
mouth of the rivers. The spade the bait-gatherers 
use is small, and the fishing girls ply it deftly with 
their hands ; a push of the spade, a grip of the 
hand, and the worm slips into the pitcher. Much 
skill and quickness are necessary, otherwise the 
worm would swiftly elude the gatherer. Only those 
trained from their childhood can ever hope to earn 
a living by the work, or to bring home a sufficient 
supply in their pitchers. The troops of women in 
early morning, or late at evening, on the wide sands 
against the expanse of sky and sea are a sight not 
readily forgotten. To one on the links the bait- 
gatherers afar off on the sands seem in their delving 
with their spades as if engaged in a sand-field. 
They are suitably attired in unison with their 
open-air surroundings — sometimes bareheaded, and 
invariably barefooted ; the married women may be 
known from the unmarried by wearing footless 
stockings, the unmarried girls not being ashamed to 
show their bright bare legs ; their hair is often con- 
cealed by coloured kerchiefs tied under their chins 
and falling over their shoulders ; their faces have 
the healthy hue bred of the sun and the sea-breeze, 
and sometimes their cheeks and hands are as brown 
as berries ; they wear gowns of print drawn up, 
ample and many-tucked dark-blue petticoats. 
Often they relieve their long walks to and from the 
sand-beds by snatches of song, which coming from 

« 2 



228 The British Seas, 

stout lungs may offend the fastidious. The tide 
waits not for them, and so they have to be at their 
task at irregular hours in the summer months. In 
early morning the village streets are awakened to the 
patter of their bare feet and to their merry laughter, 
and the vigorous sound of their singing. If the men 
are proverbially poor walkers, these bait-gatherers, 
sometimes old women (who have to eke out a sub- 
sistence by selling to the fishermen the "lugworm " 
at one shilling a pitcherful), strike out with a free 
pace. With fisherwomen, as with all labouring 
classes, youth and strength have the best of it. For 
the woman there is never at any time leisure for 
folding of the hands, nor any passive grief; she 
must ever be "up and doing. Women have ample 
work in a fishing community. Getting bait, redding 
the nets, mending them, baiting the lines, attaching 
carefully bits of lugworm, clam, or mussel to hooks 
on long cords of strong brown lines (" baiting the 
wands " is a phrase they use for sorting the deep-sea 
lines) provide constant occupation, and young girls 
soon earn enough to make them independent. The 
woman is, indeed, absolutely necessary as a help- 
mate, a partner to a fisherman, and, without her, 
he would have to pay other women for the work, so 
few fishermen are unmarried. At Dunbar it is said 
that the fisherman deteriorates from the day of his 
marriage. 

Prestonpans was once famous for its oysters, 
which bore the mouth-filling name of the " Pan- 
dore." It is some thirty years ago since an un- 



The Firth of Forth, 229 

touched bed of oysters was discovered. With the 
disappearance of the oysters the glory of Prestonpans 
seems to have set. Old men, when the oyster beds 
were, as they say, properly clad with oysters, have 
got twenty thousand in a day, and now they could, 
with a struggle, get one thousand in a week. 
Oysters, as might be imagined, bearing such a 
beautiful name as the " Pandore," were excellent, 
and famous beyond Scotland. Associated with the 
oysters is preserved what is probably the oldest 
surviving bit of lore connected with fishing folk 
along the Scottish coast. The oysters were dredged, 
as they still are, a few miles from the shore by two 
men and two boys — as well as clams, so valuable 
for bait. It was a belief, probably well founded, 
that oysters would rise the better from their beds to 
the music of a song. So, as the ancient fishermen 
and boys dredged they would raise at the pitch of 
their voices the dredger's song — 

" Dreg an oyster, dreg a clam, 

Dreg an auld wife, or dreg an auld man.'' 

How old these words are, and what their origin 
was, none can tell : these lines alone survive of the 
original ditty. Old fishermen, as their fancy 
prompted, added line upon line ; they are the same 
ancient grandfathers who declare that the metre is 
Burns', who wag their heads at the song, and find 
pleasure in recalling the parcels of nonsense their 
rhymes were. Some lines are preserved by word of 
mouth as a specimen of the extempore addition, 



230 The British Seas. 

and they have the fisherman's home-made fla- 
vour :— 

" It's my sang an' your tale — 
Brandy's guid 'mong het ale." 

And another, — 

" An' as ye work, it shall be seen, 
It shall be seen upon the green." 

It is the firm belief of the natives that the oyster 
beds were robbed to supply English fisheries some 
thirty years ago, when they were thoroughly cleaned 
out. 

On both sides of the Forth the fishermen in every 
place impress themselves strongly. A fisherman is 
never found on tramp ; seldom does he become a 
hind. He may toil on the land for some months ; 
but summer winds blow and the sea asserts itself : 
he bids good-bye to the land and its labour. With 
what irresistible might does the sea enforce its claim 
to its children ! and sometimes death only makes 
the insatiable mother more tenacious. Among 
fisherfolk, the descendants of fisherfolk who are 
riveted to the sea, there is a glamour in the sea, and 
from generations born to generations to be born 
this undying fatalism prevails. It seems to be out 
of the power of men to throw off this mighty law 
of nature. Like kings and queens, fisherfolk marry 
among themselves. This omnipresence of the sea 
for the fishers of the sea binds them by the cry of 
the waves, and the saline savour of the ocean un- 
ceasingly imparts to them the fixedness of their 
destiny, and proclaims the law of their nature, 



The Firth of Forth. 233 

which spells out the message : " Remain ; be con- 
tent ; be happy ; go round and round in the one 
narrow rut ; make a little, a very little, money ; 
scrape enough of food and sleep ; the sea will feed 
thee with ancient fables, and will claim thee for her 
own if old age and poverty escape thee." Some 
who are not born with fishermen's blood are drawn 
into this vortex-like influence. On a fishing-boat 
you soon feel the illimitable depth and wonder of 
the unknown surging around the boundless sky and 
sea, from which flight seems hopeless and escape 
impossible. To the simple-minded fishers, how un- 
speakable the delight of drawing with their nets 
money out of the sea in silvern fish, and reaping 
where they have not sown. Deep into their hearts 
has sunk the wild romance of the sea, and their 
stout hearts throb the more for joy of the large life 
of the ocean. 

What a godsend it is that fishermen inherit 
nautical instincts, so sharpened by exercise as to 
make them lion-hearted ! No man need venture to 
sea in a fishing-boat unless he has daring and skill. 
Fishermen have the blessed belief that they are 
safer in their own easily managed crafts, in which 
they ride through storms like sea-gulls, than they 
would be in larger vessels. The deep-sea boats ride 
through almost any sea. When a storm springs up, 
they prefer to keep the open sea rather than enter 
the Firth, and encounter the tides, the rocky coasts, 
in dark nights when the wind whistles and cries 
funereally in their ears, the masts croak, and the 



234 The British Seas. 

boat labours frightfully, as if for its existence, and 
the great waters tear over its bows and rush along- 
side as if the monster Death were chasing the boat 
for a victim ; while the start of a nail, the leakage 
of a plank, the rent of a sheet, or crack of a mast 
might give him entrance, and in a jiffy they would 
all be swept to Davy Jones's locker. The story of 
storms, the battle of the waves, and the artillery of 
the tempest carry sad, sad tales to the mean 
cottages in these fishing towns and villages, par- 
ticularly Eyemouth in recent years, of the death of 
fishermen ; how some are knocked overboard by 
loosened sails, some killed by falling masts, some 
found entangled in nets, and others gone amissing 
at sea and never more heard, tell of — all drowned, 
and so write sorrow on the bosom of the mighty 
deep. Let's talk of the tragedies of this coast (to 
paraphrase Richard II.) and of comfort let no man 
speak. In great storms near Dunbar — and as many 
as eight wrecks in that rock-bound district have 
been counted in one day — it is not uncommon to see 
vessels and men go down within sight and reach of 
the harbour, beyond human aid. At Eyemouth, 
one sad day in October, 1881, one hundred and 
thirty of the fishermen were drowned. When death 
strikes at one, it strikes at every other fisherman's 
door, so closely related are they by blood or mar- 
riage. 

In the rural churchyard around Whitekirk (so 
often painted by Alexander Frazer, R.S.A.), the 
parish kirk of the scenes of many shipwrecks at 



The Firth of Forth. 235 

Scoughall, Seacliff, and Auldhame rocks — where un- 
known and unclaimed men from the seas lie at rest 
(the only sounds that break the inland quiet being 
the voices of ruddy hinds' children at the school 
playground, or of young labourers making music on 
concertinas in the churchyard in the evenings, as 
they wait for farm lasses practising in the kirk 
psalm-tunes for Sunday's choir) : there, in this 
churchyard, sways with every breeze that blows 
a modest tin-plate " headstone," quaintly com- 
memorating the tragedies of this coast in these 
suggestive lines : — 

" I went to sea ! Death came to me ! 
And took me hence away ! 
The ship was wrecked, and all was lost 

Upon that Fatal day. 
Death comes to all, both great and small, 
And it shall come to you." 

And yet, to the hinds and cottager shipwreck are 
not unmixed calamities ; as their experience proves, 
they are special dispensations of providence in their 
favour. For instance, some hinds were sent as 
usual at spring to cart seaware from the beach, and 
one was seen suspiciously to pick up something 
and secretly put it in his pocket. It was only some 
brass buttons from a shipwreck, he said, not worth 
an auld sang ; but a remarkably sudden transforma- 
tion came over the fortune of that man's family. 
It must, in justice, be said that the labourers at 
Seacliff, and the hinds at Auldhame, under the 
charge of the farmer, gallantly and successfully work 



2^6 The British Seas. 



the life-saving apparatus there both by day and by 
night. 

You notice that each prominence of this rocky, 
bluff seaboard is possessed by magnificent castles 
beetling on the ocean — Tantallon, Dunbar, Fast 
(scene of the " Bride of Lammermuir "), Berwick, 
and Bamborough, all bearing the golden stains of 
time, to quote Mr. Ruskin, the great glory of stern 
watching, of mysterious sympathy, which we feel in 
walls that have long been washed by the passing 
waves of humanity, and, let me add, by the sound- 
ing waves of the sea. No man can look unmoved 
on the seascapes here — those modern sea-knights, 
the fishermen of Grace Darling's country, cradled 
in surge and storm — the old castles, the older 
villages, overlooking the wide swell of the German 
Ocean, within reach of its hoarse, resounding waves, 
where nature becomes rich in tints and colours, and 
where the atmosphere is aglow with lambent light 
which artists make manifest ; the generous sea- 
board soil ; the warmer colour and greater wealth 
of land and sea ; the great Border country — so 
associated with burly borderers' bloody struggles and 
international conflicts — that greets so kindly the 
all-night traveller from London in the morning, and 
leaps straight into a warm corner of his heart. The 
coast's high cliffs are haunted by geologists, botan- 
ists, naturalists, and sea-birds, where the sea's 
sombrous sound is symbolic of the monotonous 
melancholy main. Picturesque Berwick ! (where, 
by the way, a distance seaward of five miles is 



The Firth of Forth. 237 

claimed for trawlers) with laws and speech of its 
own — Scottish in blood and in Scottish soil, yet of 
English fashion, with its old gates and high walls — 
and Holy Island across the wide, wet sands, with 
its tiny castle and two soldiers in charge, where you 
will get your heart's content of fishermen's yarns of 
smuggling, shipwrecks, and catches, are worth visit- 
ing by any child of romance. The Fame Isles dot 
the sea ; down the straight, dangerous Northumber- 
land coast peaceful, pretty hamlets succeed each 
other, and you reach bright, breezy Tynemouth, 
jutting out to sea and nestling under Prince's Haven, 
where we are at rest. 



CHAPTER X 

THE NORTH SEA. 

The Port of Newcastle — The River Tyne— View from the high 
level bridge— Story of the Tyne — Types of Tyne-built ships 
— The old collier — The Tyne in mid-winter — Armstrong, 
Mitchell, and Co.— Robert Stephenson & Co. — Ordnance 
and locomotives — Tynemouth and Cullercoats — The story 
of the lifeboat — Henry Taylor and the lightship — Grace 
Darling — Collingwood's crew at Trafalgar — Sunderland : 
its narrowness, its industries— Seaham harbour and Lord 
Byron — The Hartlepools — A pretty winter picture — The 
well- deck steamer — Middlesborough and the Tees — The 
story of the Tees — Mr. John Yaughan and the Cleveland 
Hills. 

The port of Newcastle is twenty miles long. Such 
prodigious dimensions I was unable to understand 
until it was explained to me that the port begins at 
the mouth of the river down at Tynemouth and 
South Shields, though how high up it extends I am 
unable to say, unless the district called " Scotswood " 
be its limit. The Tyne is not a river that one would 
call noble. It lacks the majesty that one finds in 
the Thames below bridges, despite the disgusting 
colour of the water till one falls in with the blue of 
the Channel tide, streaming in to clarify London's 
rolling volume of pease-soup ; nor has it the dignity 
of the Mersey, nor the beauty of the Clyde ; but in 



The Nort/i Sea. 239 

my humble judgment the Tyne is a more remarkable 
stream than all the other rivers put together. 

It was but the other day, so to speak — well, within 
living memory, at all events — that the bar at the 
mouth of the Tyne obstructed the entrance of any 
sort of vessel that was at all bigger than Fielding's 
famous cod-smack. At low water, as it is called, 
people pulled off their shoes and stockings and waded 
across, whilst there were parts where the bed of the 
river dried into hard mud. The transformation that 
has been wrought makes this river the wonder that 
everybody finds it. Steamers whose tonnage runs 
into thousands come and go, and they come and go 
with as much facility in the River Tyne as in the 
River Thames. The Docks are such receptacles as 
to fully justify the pride — I may say, the enthusiasm 
— with which the people of the district speak about 
them. The great High Level Bridge, which connects 
Gateshead and Newcastle for the railway and the 
pedestrian, is a miracle of skill, of strength, of 
beauty ; an object that when I was living in 
Newcastle I was never weary of admiring. Robert 
Stephenson could not have desired to leave a nobler 
memorial of his genius behind him. I have leaned 
over the bridge and for long spells at a time have 
forgotten myself in contemplation of the picture of 
the river far down beneath me, with its shore of wild 
and grimy Gateshead on the right, and the busy 
Quayside and its lengths of palatial offices on the 
left. 

Byron's love of rocks whereon to muse is very well 



240 The British Seas, 

for the poet who is on the look-out for hints from 
nature — for a revelation from the stars — for a 
whisper from the ocean — for some deep secret of 
the earth, half muttered in the moan of a passage of 
night wind. But he, as Dr. Samuel Johnson would 
say, who labours after a just comprehension of the 
vicissitudes of human life, its vanities, its toils, its 
achievements, and, let me add (with a side glance at 
the Quayside), its defeats, its failures, and its humi- 
liations, must take his stand upon the High Level 
Bridge. It was but the other day, as I have said, 
that yonder river, flowing darkly many feet below, 
was an insignificant, fordable stream. How long 
ago ? Well, I believe the year was about 1850, at 
which date the Tyne came into the hands of its 
present Conservators. In those days the .old town 
of Sunderland was having it all her own way. The 
Wear could not be called a rival, for practically 
there was no Tyne. But some forty years ago, the 
Tynesiders, with Joseph Cowen at their head — Sir 
Joseph, who had for a son one of the most eloquent 
men this nation of eloquent men has ever produced 
— went to work with a will. There was a Tyne 
Improvement Bill; and when that was passed the 
dredger was set to work. The dredger is a species 
of barge that scoops out mud ; how many of these 
fabrics were employed I do not know. But day after 
day, for months and months, the monotonously 
revolving scoops were slowly and obstinately deepen- 
ing the channel. Then piers were built at the 
mouth of the river — piers and some docks. Yet I 



The North Sea. 241 

believe that down to the year 1861 the progress by 
no means corresponded with the outlay, and with 
the general Tyneside resolution to reduce the River 
Wear to a second-hand accomplishment. Ships 
light of draught, comparatively speaking, took the 
mud when their hatches were flush, and remained 
immovable at the top of high water despite the sea- 
blessings profusely showered upon the Conservators 
by rough ocean skippers and owners whose "little 
all " was to be expressed in the words " prompt 
dispatch." An immense effort was then made, 
inspired by Mr. Ure, whose name, though a house- 
hold word at Newcastle, may possibly be unfamiliar 
to many of the readers of this volume. Mr. Ure 
came forward with a vast and masterly plan of 
dredging, and to him — at all events to a very great 
extent — the Tynesider owes a river he dearly loves 
and justly boasts of, no matter in what part of the 
world he may be encountered. 

This little piece of local history should be known 
to the man who pauses upon the High Level Bridge 
for the purpose of looking about him, and musing 
upon the varied and wonderful scene that is spread, 
as on canvas, below. A very forest of chimneys 
point their sooty apertures skywards, and from every 
one of them pours the black smoke of the coal-fed 
furnace, or the white vapour of the chemical works. 
The atmospheric effects are wonderful and beautiful. 
The river rolls in a surface of sullen darkling steel 
betwixt the giant supporters of the great bridge, and 
the magic of the atmosphere, wrought by the blend- 

R 



242 The British Seas. 

ing of the lights and shades of the smoke-tinctured 
district, makes the stream look as wide again as it 
is. 

Twenty types of vessels fix the attention. There is 
the huge, hideous slate-coloured, camel-backed tank, 
waiting for her engines. She is the latest horror of 
one of the ship-building yards betwixt the High Level 
Bridge and Tynemouth, and a startling example of 
the ability of the modern shipwright to combine the 
amplest possibility of insurance with the smallest 
possible expenditure in the direction of safety. How 
that deadly structure will show a little later on — that 
death-dealing structure, whose rivets are no better 
than sticking-plaster; whose plates provide the 
same security against the perils of the sea that one 
would look for in a fabric fashioned out of the lids of 
bandboxes ; whose engines will barely have power to 
drive her head to wind against a topgallant breeze 
— how she will presently show, you may gather by 
observing that steamer at the Quayside, newly 
arrived, waiting to be discharged ; a small ship 
whose decks, as you look down upon them, are full 
of motion, of little wriggling, running figures, of 
revolving steam machinery, and the like. She lies 
upon the water as a board would ; her height of side 
almost wholly consists of bulwarks. Level those 
bulwarks — reduce her to the line of her main deck 
by removing that extraordinary deformity forward, 
styled a topgallant forecastle, and then, were you to 
cross to the Gateshead side and survey her from the 
height of your own stature, you would see nothing 



The North Sea. 243 

of her hull — nothing of the ship saving the funnel 
that leans over her stern, and the pole mast in the 
bow, whose purpose as a derrick is not to be dis- 
sembled by its two square yards. 

How can captains find men to ship in such vessels ? 
How can owners find captains to take charge of 
them? It cannot be because sailors "must live," 
since, to use a Paddyism, sailors can only get their 
living aboard such craft by perishing. But to the 
musing, poetic eye, looking down from over the 
parapet of the High Level Bridge, these man-killing 
monstrosities serve their turn very well as bits 
of colour. Their slates and reds, their gleam of 
glass and sparkle of brass, blend into a sort of beauty 
with the other richly-hued details. They suggest 
life, menacing as they are with death ! They express 
commerce, and they also indicate that paralyzing 
stress of competition which is crowding the ports, 
the docks, and the rivers of this country with lines 
upon lines of what the old naval Jacks called 
" Rotten Rows." 

The business of the Tyne is more concentrated 
than that of the Thames, and one seems, therefore, 
to find more movement here than in the southern 
stream. The tug snorts, and splashes, and drives ; 
the old collier, too, that seems a hundred years old, 
is not wanting : see her, lean, gaunt, and hungry, 
ill-conditioned and beggared by the " strumpet 
winds," which she has wrestled with for one knows 
not how long. A little imagination will find some- 
thing dim and bleared in her aspect, and she seems 

R 2 



244 The British Seas. 

to lean upon, rather than to strain at her old 
chain-cable, as though it were a crutch. The fancy 
goes to Whitby at sight of her — to Whitby or Blyth, 
and to Captain Cook. You are witnessing our iron 
naval story in the making when you look down upon 
the metal steamer — at the metal sailing ship ; but 
yonder old collier is like the word finis at the end of 
a volume : the story she illustrates is ended ; all the 
old romance, the old life of the sea, its pigtails, its 
cocked hats, its line-of-battle ships, its press-gangs, 
are contained in the chapters of which that old 
Geordie over there might well be the last recorded 
syllable. 

Most of the rivers that I am acquainted with show 
best on a fine summer's day ; but to my mind all 
that is impressive in the scenery of the Tyne is best 
accentuated by midwinter, when the sky is dark 
with bodies of flying vapour whose shoulders are 
whitened by the rushing snow-squall, when the shrill 
gale is whipping the water into ripples which foam 
as they run, when the white of the snow gives a 
ghastly staring face to the country by contrast with 
the black and grimy chimneys and coaly structures 
which crow T d the river's banks. When Nature is 
in these midwinter humours old Father Tyne is 
entirely in sympathy with her. There seems to be 
nothing fit in sunshine and blue heavens for this 
wonderful northern river of labour, smoke, and 
machinery. Butterflies and flowers, the emerald- 
bright lawns of the Thames, the stooping and 
sipping willow, the swan, the little flowery island — 



The North Sea. 247 

these are things not to be reconciled with one's 
memory of the winding mills of Tyne, with its 
railways and its factories, its ironworks and ship- 
building yards, its collieries, its bleak huddles of 
artisans' homes. 

The two distinctive features of Newcastle every- 
body must own, I think, to be the ordnance works 
of Armstrong and Co. and the locomotive works 
of Robert Stephenson and Co. I remember some 
years ago spending a day in these wonderful factories, 
and I behold again with the eye of memory the 
great scene of locomotive shops and sheds, the teem- 
ing life, the blazing furnaces, the thunderstorms of 
smoke and sparks, the gigantic sheaves of metal, the 
boilers, the rooms thrilling with whirring machinery, 
the sudden volcanic emissions of blinding brilliance 
under the action of the fan-blasts, whose pulse 
trembles through one's bones into the very inner- 
most being of the inner man. I carry with me, too, 
a lifelong impression of gigantic ordnance — monster 
pieces finished and unfinished ; and I also remember 
wondering, as I applied my eye to the mouth of 
some colossal engine of war, whose power was to 
be expressed in I know not how many tons, whether, 
all things being equal, these enormous guns were 
going to do the execution we read of as the result of 
a broadside in the days of thirty-six and forty-two 
pounders. Oppose the metal of the armour-clad to 
these eighty and a hundred tonners, and oppose the 
timber sides of an old liner to such guns as Howe 
won the victory of the 1st of June with — what of 



248 The British Seas. 

the destruction to follow ? When Collingwood, who 
was born in Newcastle, carried the Royal Sovereign 
into battle he blew out the stern of the Santa Ana, 
and killed and wounded four hundred of her crew. 
There are a good many problems for the next naval 
war to solve ; but that the science of slaughter in 
these days is going to prove superior to the art of 
murder in times which we now pronounce ex- 
ceedingly primitive, I am never more inclined to 
doubt than when I think of the yardarm to yard- 
arm engagement, the withering swiftness of the 
British fire, the volleyings from sharp-shooters in the 
tops into the crowded, unsheltered decks, with the 
powder-magazine by no means inaccessible to a 
round-shot, and a company of nine hundred and 
perhaps a thousand souls in a ship of about eighteen 
hundred tons to massacre — when I think, I say, of 
these things, and then take a view of the weapon 
that is to throw- a projectile seven or eight miles, 
and reflect upon twelve-inch plates and fabrics sunk 
almost to the wash of the water. 

The mouth of the Tyne offers a picturesque 
scene as you pass it. On the north shore is Tyne- 
mouth, which is to Newcastle and its district as 
Margate and Ramsgate are to London. The sands 
of Cullercoats stretch away in gold, and they give a 
wonderful depth and richness of colour to the 
chocolate-tinctured line of coast. But though the 
spirit of griminess holds aloof from Tynemouth, 
where all is clean and bright and cheerful, full of 
the suggestions of seaside summer holiday-making, 



The North Sea. 249 

it lurks very adjacent in North Shields and over the 
way in South Shields, in defiance of the garden-like 
effects the people of that famous old coastal town 
have been importing of late months — with an eye, 
no doubt, to their rival opposite. Of the two 
Shields it would be very hard to say which is the 
grimier. On the whole I think that to South 
Shields must be conceded all the merit that superior 
sootiness can claim. But then it is the home, the 
birthplace, of the Lifeboat ! an historic detail of its 
centuries-old story which must entitle it to the 
respect and veneration of all seafarers. 

For many years Tynemouth obtained the credit 
of the introduction of the lifeboat. But the matter 
has been set at rest by the erection at South Shields 
of a memorial to the two claimants to the inven- 
tion — Greathead and Wouldhave. It is unfortu- 
nate that the respective pretensions of these men 
cannot be determined. Wouldhave is said to have 
invented the lifeboat, and Greathead to have im- 
proved it ; but their contemporaries assumed Great- 
head as the sole inventor, and in 1802 the House of 
Commons granted him a sum of 1200/. as compen- 
sation for his losses over the idea. The story of the 
first lifeboat was told by Sir Cuthbert Heron, Bart., 
of South Shields. During a heavy gale of wind a 
vessel named the Adventure stranded on the Herd 
Sands ; Sir Cuthbert was amongst the crowd who 
viewed the dreadful sight, and he offered a reward 
to any seaman who should put off to rescue the 
perishing crew. No man responded. The sea ran 



250 The British Seas. 

furiously and dangerously high, and there was no 
boat fit to encounter it. The whole of the crew of 
the Adventure perished within three hundred yards 
of the shore. The effect of this dismal ocean spec- 
tacle upon the public of South Shields was such 
that a number of persons immediately met, and 
agreed to offer a reward to any one who should 
submit a plan of a boat of an approvable sort for the 
preservation of human life. Greathead's plan or 
model was thought well of; a committee was 
formed, and a sum of money raised by subscription 
for the building of the boat. 

Such, in a few words, was the origin of the lifeboat. 
The boatmen hung in the wind at first ; but they 
were coaxed by offers of reward to man Greathead's 
fabric, and the experiment once made established 
her, against their prejudices, as a safe boat. The 
example of South Shields was followed in course of 
time by North Shields, Lowestoft, Ramsgate, Mon- 
trose, and other places. But how primitive those 
early boats were, one may judge by the prices 
charged for building them. A ten-oared boat of the 
largest size cost a hundred and sixty-five pounds ; 
in these times the charge would be from seven 
hundred to one thousand pounds. There is no 
nobler service the wide world over, and South 
Shields merits all possible applause for honouring 
the memory of Greathead and Wouldhave. 

North Shields should follow the example of her 
sister over the way by honouring the memory of a 
man whose work was certainly not less valuable than 



The North Sea. 251 

that of the inventor of the lifeboat. I refer to Henry 
Taylor. " Who was he ? " inquires the reader. 
Henry Taylor was an old master-mariner, to whose 
judgment and indomitable pluck and perseverance 
the seafaring world owes the Lightship. Until 
Henry Taylor bestirred himself, that deadly stretch 
of Channel shoal, called the " Goodwin Sands," was 
lampless — a vast, black grave on a dark night 
for the entombing of ships and their crews, and 
year after year scores were perishing there, and 
cargoes of value running into hundreds and thou- 
sands sinking to the bottom. Observe those sands 
now : small, but immensely strong, red-hulled 
vessels ride north and south and east and west of 
them ; their lanterns sparkle brilliantly by night ; 
there are guns and rockets on board to instantly 
communicate the news of a disaster to the shore ; 
by day they are like finger-posts, pointing out the 
right road to the puzzled mariner. Is not the 
memory of the man who first caused the floating 
light to be moored in useful adjacency to the deadly 
shoal worth honouring ? Is Henry Taylor less a 
benefactor to his species than Greathead ? Let 
North Shields see to it. The whole district should 
subscribe to a memorial, and not the poorest Jack, 
I believe, on the North-east coast but would be 
ready with the value of even half an ounce of tobacco 
as a contribution. 

Grace Darling is another dominant name here- 
abouts. The scene of her famous exploit — the 
Fame Islands — is at some distance from the Tyne, 



252 The British Seas. 

yet not so much out of hail but that the story may 
be incorporated with Tyneside localisms. A diver 
once told me that, being at the Fame Islands, he 
was induced by curiosity to sink in his dress to the 
bottom, to have a look at the wreck of the Forfar- 
shire, as she lay, and as she had been lying for years, 
in the glass-clear water. 

" She went down to leeward of the island, sir," 
said he to me. 

" And what of that ? " said I, perceiving his drift 
nevertheless. 

" Why," he answered, ''as she was to leeward, 
the job of reaching her must have been trifling ; 
consequently too much has been made of the yarn." 

I looked the man over, as the Americans say, and 
wondered how he would have acted had he been 
in Grace Darling's place. There never can be 
any virtue in the discovery of a diver to diminish 
the glory of this maid's achievement. Grace 
Darling's deed is one of those few heroical acts 
about which too much has not been said because 
too much can never be said. The coble in which 
she rescued the unhappy people is yet, I believe, to 
be seen ; and one needs to view it to fully appre- 
ciate Grace's story. Observe the dimensions of 
the little ark, and then realize the sea that was 
running that night, the foam of broken waters, the 
recoiling hurl of the boiling billows furiously charg- 
ing the iron rocks of the islands ! Surely England 
has never produced a daughter in whose memory 
she has reason to feel greater pride. 




u 



H 

'> 

a 

o 



The North Sea. 255 

All this part of the coast has long enjoyed re- 
nown for its breed of sailors. I fancy that the 
Tyne hit the hardest blow of all England's deliveries 
in that way in our naval war. The coasting trade 
was the famous nursery of the British mariner, and 
there was always an eager seeking after the " coal- 
man " by the press-gang. No race of Johnnies, as 
they were called, were ever their equal for alertness, 
for forecastle seamanship, and for fighting. It is 
said that the majority of Collingwood's crew at 
Trafalgar were Tynesiders. No naval seaman 
better appreciated the marine products of the 
Shields, and it is more than probable that he 
was always on the look-out for all gentlemen of the 
jacket who knew the meaning of the word 
" hinney," and who pronounced Newcastle, " New- 
cassel." 

Sunderland is not very far south of Newcastle, 
and until one comes to the mouth of the River 
Wear there is not much coastal scenery to talk 
about. The impression I preserve of Sunderland is 
that of narrowness. Its river is wide and good, but 
one might suppose that land was enormously costly 
when they first began to build here, and that the 
issue of the general architectural plan was a hard 
squeeze. I recollect the principal street on a 
Saturday night. You would have thought that all 
Durham had turned out to take an airing in this 
narrow thoroughfare. The elbows were much more 
needed than the legs. Locomotion was extravagantly 
slow. The dreadful disaster that happened some 



256 The British Seas. 

years ago, when scores of poor little children were 
crushed to death, seemed to be largely owing to 
Sunderland's singular taste for tight fits. I do not 
know whether the railway station has been enlarged 
since I was at Sunderland, but I have a clear re- 
collection of the narrowness of its platforms, of the 
narrowness of its exits and entrances, of the 
narrowness of its lobby and of its waiting-rooms. 
The original motive for all this slenderness of 
dimensions might probably be in a desire to stimu- 
late progress by inducing a haunting sense of stress ; 
just as at Bath, they made the pavements extra- 
ordinarily wide that society there, which lounges and 
never works, might have plenty of room for cutting 
one another in the public streets. 

But though Sunderland's commercial prosperity 
may not be of the Tyneside character, there is 
everywhere a wonderful suggestion of growth, of 
trade, of activity in a hundred directions. One 
must go to the river to compass the character of 
the industries. The docks are spacious and crowded 
with shipping ; here are works for testing anchors 
and chain cables, and I was told, when I inspected 
them, that they were the finest in the kingdom. 
Here are huge granaries, engineering works, boiler 
works, saw-mills, creosote works, shipbuilding yards 
in plenty, lines of staiths for ever feeding the 
voracious maws of steamers or sinking colliers to 
their wash-streaks. But the noise ! The distract- 
ing commingling of volcanic sounds ! Locomotives 
shrieking, strings of loaded waggons thundering 



The North Sea. 257 

past, a countless beating of iron plates, an endless 

harsh clanging of machines and hammers ! Is there 

any part of Sunderland to which the uproar of 

the river does not penetrate ? That people should 

go on living and hearing — existing and yet preserving 

their auricular organs — is a triumphant illustration 

of the power of habit to dominate all physical 

conditions. 

One hauls out from the land after the ship's nose 

is clear of the South Outlet, and but very little 

of the coast is held in sight. What you notice you 

will find of the familiar type hereabouts— a character 

of iron ruggedness — a dark, low, forbidding terrace 

of cliff, with a menace of its own in the scowl of 

it in places, as though it were very well acquainted 

with the quality and temper of the ocean foe, the 

wild North Sea, that washes the length of it. It is 

this part of the coast that suggests to memory the 

fine old lines : — 

*' When the fierce North wind with his airy forces 
Rears up the North Sea to a foaming fury, 
And the red lightning, with a storm of hail, comes 

Rushing amain down, 
How the poor sailors stand amaz'd and tremble, 
Whilst the hoarse thunder, like a bloody trumpet, 
Roars a loud onset to the gaping waters, 

Quick to devour them ! " 

Seaham Harbour is hard by ; but what is one to 
say of it ? It is safe, perhaps, to speak of it as 
"quaint." Lord Byron's association with Seaham 
renders it memorable. They show you his "Walk," 
as they call it, in the grounds of the seat of the 
Milbankes — Lord Londonderry's house, where the 

s 



258 The British Seas. 

poet was wont to aim at a mark with pistols; and 
they also show you the book signed by him after his 
marriage, with " Isabella Milbanke " written in 
clean, neat characters under " Byron." But Sea- 
ham is a terribly dull place, and what annals it has 
are not very much enlivened by the record of the 
hideous colliery accident that occurred close to it — 
how many years ago I cannot tell. 

Nor, supposing us to sail away from Seaham with 
spirits depressed by the melancholy of the little 
town, shall we find very much to cheer us at the 
next place we look into — and that must be Hartle- 
pool, or " the Hartleypools," as it is locally pro- 
nounced. Nevertheless, I preserve the memory of 
a pretty bit of colour. The day was of a steel-grey 
hue, and of an ice-coldness, insomuch that the at- 
mosphere pressed upon the face as though the cheek 
were laid against an iron plate. A gale of wind had 
been blowing, but it was now a dead calm, and the 
sea came swinging along in oil-smooth grey folds 
which rushed soundlessly to the beach, where they 
arched in giant combers and thundered into foam 
with a note of hurricane in the roar of their fall. 
I took notice of a stretch of cliff rounding to the 
westward from the Heugh lights. The picture was 
one of wintry beauty, dim, grey, of proportions 
somewhat swollen. There were the yellow sands, 
the breakwater, the old pier, the harbour extending 
from the jetty on the Middleton side to the ship- 
yard ; and down upon the beach, lying on her beam 
ends, was the wreck of a schooner. What magic 



The North Sea. 259 

was there in these plain details to impress one ? 
Yet I can recall that picture when memory goes 
to work in vain to submit brighter and nobler 
scenes. 

The Hartlepools are notorious for the " well- 
deck " steamer. I do not say that this type of ship 
is wholly peculiar to the port, but she is very much 
built there, and very much believed in there, and I 
have been led into more than one squabble by de- 
nouncing her in the public press as perhaps the 
most dangerous example of the shipwright's theory 
of ocean-going fabrics to be anywhere met with. 
The pages of an illustrated volume are no proper 
place for the discussion of such a subject as this, yet 
I think it would not be in seafaring human nature to 
pronounce the name of Hartlepool without mutter- 
ing a forecastle blessing upon the steamers which 
she builds, engines, overloads, mans, and dis- 
patches. 

After Newcastle and Sunderland the several in- 
dustries which flourish at the Hartlepools do not 
greatly astonish. Yet in writing of this port some 
years ago I said that, taking into consideration the 
dock accommodation, the situation of the towns, and 
the powerful railway interest that backs them, it 
would be impossible not to agree with those who 
regard the Hartlepools as the north-eastern port of 
the future. Let us hope they may become so. Un- 
happily there is always a rival, and Middlesborough 
is just round the corner, with a river scarcely less 
wonderful in its history than the Tyne. 

s 2 



260 The British Seas. 

You must put into the mouth of the Tees to wit- 
ness the scenery here, for the land hollows into a 
very yawn to the river itself, and the deck of a ship 
standing north or south is not very likely to give 
you a view of this coast. Middlesborough grew in 
silence, and in silence has taken her place as a port 
that is rapidly increasing in greatness and import- 
ance. There is nothing so modest as the history of 
Middlesborough. A vast work was being done, yet 
nobody outside the district knew of it. Never shall 
I forget my astonishment when I visited the Tees 
for the first time, and, in company with the late Mr. 
John Fowler, the engineer, made the voyage from 
Middlesborough to the river's mouth. I had always 
imagined the Tees an insignificant, fordable stream, 
and I found it a wide, rolling river, the creation, 
comparatively speaking, of a few years of obscure 
but giant labour. On both sides rose mountains of 
clay, the refuse of the smelted ironstone. It formed 
embankments, it ran in lines of cliff, wild and pic- 
turesque, with ravines and gorges ; all about were 
acres upon acres of land reclaimed from the sea, 
and built on, and cultivated ; again and again, as 
we passed along, my eye was taken by some great 
spread of buildings — steel-works, rolling-mills, lofty 
structures of brick and iron, eighty feet high, called 
blast-furnaces, full of fire, with gas in wide sheets 
hissing from their summits. 

And, indeed, one cannot get a better view of 
Middlesborough than from the top of one of these 
same fire-loaded structures, from whose base the 



The North Sea. 26 r 

liquid metal runs in the colour of blood into the 
shapes of sand or soil, where it cools, and solidifies 
into "pigs." I took my first bird's-eye view of 
Middlesborough from the head of a blast-furnace 
belonging to Messrs. Bell Brothers at Port Clarence. 
Below me the river ran, coiling seawards ; on the 
banks of it were shipyards stocked with fabrics 
illustrating every degree of construction. Where 
Bolckow's works stand the sky looked thunderous 
with smoke, and its tempestuous aspect was not a 
little heightened by the scarlet flashes of the 
furiously blown furnaces. The town seemed on fire. 
In all directions flames broke from towering aper- 
tures, and the forest aspect of the lofty chimneys 
was thickened and darkened by the complexities of 
the masts, and yards, and rigging of ships in the 
dock. 

The romantic story goes that the late Mr. John 
Vaughan, one of the founders of the famous firm of 
Bolckow, stumbled into his immense fortune whilst 
rabbit-shooting on the Cleveland Hills, by kicking 
some piece of stuff, which he picked up, examined, 
and found to be ironstone. The tale is not quite 
true. The Cleveland Hills were coaxed into deliver- 
ing their secret not by a trifling accident befalling 
a middle-aged gentleman on a rabbit-shooting ex- 
pedition, but by a deliberate process of boring. 
When the quality and extent of the ironstone was 
determined, Mr. Vaughan went hastily to work to 
obtain leases for the working of large royalties at 
Eston. It was said that he took care, during his 



262 The British Seas. 

negotiations, to leave the owners of the land in 
ignorance of his discovery, so that their royalty 
payment did not exceed fourpence per ton, though 
it afterwards rose to sixpence and ninepence. Pro- 
bably the owners of the land were amongst the first 
to applaud in Mr. John Vaughan the business-like 
spirit of reticence he exhibited in approaching them. 
At all events his memory is entitled to this honour, 
that if he were not instrumental in creating Middles- 
borough, its rapid growth is very largely owing 
to his discovery and to his energetic application of 
it. 

Mr. Fowler told me that less than thirty years 
ago — as time now stands — the depth of water at 
Middlesborough at low water on ordinary spring 
tides was three feet, and a trifle over sixteen feet at 
high water, and I remember that he added : " The 
course over the bar is fixed, and the depth, which 
twenty years ago was three feet, is now thirty feet 
at ordinary spring tides." In districts of this sort 
we find the face of nature to a large extent manu- 
factured. Little is submitted that is proper for 
poetic interpretation. How can the muse sing of 
breakwaters of slag, of rubble mounds, and trans- 
verse jetties, of bleak stretches of reclaimed soil, of 
hoppers, and steam-tugs, and dredges ? But if 
poetry can do little or nothing with such matters, 
commerce, and especially the commerce of a port, 
can do little or nothing without them. Viewed by 
daylight, I fear this part of the kingdom submits 
little more than a surface of highly valuable, but 



The North Sea. 263 

exceedingly prosaic details ; but the hand of Night 
waves the wand of the magician over the scene, and 
the picture is startling and magnificent as a vision 
of fire. The sky is scarlet, there is a perpetual play 
as of crimson lightning-flashes ; in fact, the earliest 
impression one gets on visiting these flaming parts 
is that innumerable houses in the towns are being 
rapidly consumed, that the efforts of the firemen are 
paralyzed, and that the streets must be filled with 
crowds who stand contemplating with silent horror 
the destruction of all they own in the world. 



CHAPTER XL 

THE NORTH SEA (continued). 

Whitby — Joshua Coxon, poet — Walter Besant on Whitby — The 
whaler's yarn — In the North Sea in a smack — A gale of 
wind — An old Danish frigate — Scarborough— Steamboat 
excursions — The Thames. 

Redcar, Saltburn, and then Whitby. Roaring, lire- 
consuming, blast-furnacing Middlesborough might 
be on the other side of England — on the other side 
of the world, indeed — so astonishing is the difference. 
On Whitby seems to rest the ancestral hush of the 
coast. It is one of those dim old 'longshore places 
which seem to demand a special Act of Parliament 
for their preservation. Mastiffs should be employed 
to keep the jerry-builder at bay, and other secret 
deadly engines placed in all parts which the im- 
prover considers " eligible." Whitby does not in 
the least degree resemble Sandwich, yet one thinks 
of Sandwich when one explores the old parts of 
Whitby. But then the maritime traditions of 
W 7 hitby are out and away more interesting, more 
briny, more charged with the spirit of old ocean 
than those of Sandwich, or indeed of any other port, 
whether stranded or not, that I can call to mind. 



M 






&r 



) \,\K 







fi 



The North Sea. 267 

For when you are at Whitby you think of the old 
Baltic trade, the motherly old whaler, all beam and 
boats and davits ; and of fishing in many directions, 
all of an antique sort. Whitby was the birthplace of 
a poet but little known to fame ; his name was Joshua 
Coxon, and to him, and to nobody else, posterity 
owes these verses : — 

" Navigation is that noble art 
That guides a ship when far from land, 
And to any distant part 
When practised by a skilful hand. 

" To guide a ship along the shore 
You must have compass, line, and lead, 
Likewise a good look-out afore 
If any danger be ahead. 

"When to a harbour you do go, 
Or place of safety for to ride, 
You must calculate also 
What time will serve you for the tide." 

There are two more verses, but as a sample of the 
poetic genius of seafaring Whitby, the above will be 
considered sufficient as well as conclusive. 

In his interesting narrative of the life and death 
of Captain Cook, Mr. Walter Besant has given us a 
very pretty sketch of old Whitby : — 

" Under the east cliff there is nestled the oldest part of 
Whitby town. Here is the old Town Hall, built upon a great 
central pillar, thicker than those of Durham Cathedral, with a 
pillar of more slender diameter for each of the corners. Here 
are two narrow streets running parallel with the cliff, and half- 
a-dozen courts running up the lower slope before the cliff 
begins. Under the town hall is the market ; as you see it to- 



268 



The British S, 



eas. 



day so James Cook saw it that day when he walked in from 
Staithes : pigs and sheep, poultry, fruit and vegetables are sold 
in this market. For fish you can go to the quay on the other 
side. Many of the houses in this part of the town have got the 
date of their erection over the doors ; one is dated 1704, another 
1688, and so on ; by far the greater part of them are more than 
a hundred years old. In the lower of the two streets, courts, 




Yarmouth. By J. M. W. Turner. 



nearly as narrow as the Yarmouth passages, run down to the 
water's edge, or to houses built overhanging the water." 

There is never any lack of public-houses where 
'longshore Jack is, and Whitby is by no means 
illiberally stocked in this way. Mr. Besant mentions 
the " Raffled Anchor," and says, " When the sailor 
is not afloat he loves to sit where he can gaze upon 



The North Sea. 269 

a harbour, and ships, and the blue water outside." 
True for you, Mr. Besant. The sailor is a web- 
footed creature ; he must be able to dabble, or he 
will mope, and sicken, and perish. Here at Whitby 
are public-houses which the imagination easily 
repeoples with marine types and forms long since 
vanished : mariners in red waistcoats, incredible as 
such scarecrows must seem to us in this age ; 
mariners with long tails tied down their backs ; stiff 
and thick in fearnought, in wool stockings, in frieze 
jackets ; their noses are of a jolly red with rum and 
storm, and their merry, groggy little eyes, deep sunk 
as though from the pressure of the heavy gales of 
wind into which they have been staring, on and off, 
ever since they first went to sea, and long before 
they were strong enough to ship a handspike. 

It amuses the fancy to figure an assemblage of 
such Jacks as these. The whaler's yarn would be 
excellently in keeping with the weather-worn old 
room in which the sailors sit, and with the sulky 
voice of the sea tumbling upon the beach. " There 
she blows!" I seem to hear him say, '"There 
she blows ! " I sung out from the foretopmast head. 
" Where away ? " they bawls from the deck. " On the 
weather quarter," says I. " There she blows ! " 
Up comes the cap'n. "Down helhum ! " he says, 
says he. " Luff the ship to the wind. Round in 
on them lee braces, and aft with your mainsheet, 
Mr. Deadeye," he says to the mate. " Get them jib- 
sheets flattened in, and make her all snug for going 
about. Shake a reef out of the foretopsail, and loose 
the fore-topgarns , l. This 'ere bucket's got to laugh to- 



270 The British Seas. 

day ! " And thus the yarn proceeds, as one dreams, 
thinking of the " Raffled Anchor " and old Whitby. 

All away down this coast, past the Humber and 
on to Yarmouth, the fishing smack is probably the 
most abundant of all craft. I have never sailed in a 
trawler hailing from the north and eastern seaboard, 
but I have spent anight in the North Sea in a Rams- 
gate smack, and may venture, therefore, to claim a 
small acquaintance with the work that is done, the 
hardships suffered, the perils encountered by the 
stalwart and gallant bands of men who are year 
after year breasting the surge of the German Ocean 
that our tables may be supplied and our appetites 
coaxed. There is no prettier sight than a fleet of 
smacks leading out for the fishing ground, and few 
pictures, I believe, could dwell more fixedly on the 
memory than these same smacks outweathering a 
heavy gale of wind, with their trawls aboard, and 
lying-to under a fragment of canvas. There is an 
old saying, " A fisherman's walk — three steps and 
overboard." If I had felt the truth of this before it 
came on to blow, my realization of its significance 
grew poignant afterwards. There were thirty or 
forty smacks in sight, some of them Ramsgate 
boats, but from what ports the others hailed I could 
not tell. It had blown a pleasant breeze of wind 
all day, but the sky had thickened in the north some 
hour or two before sundown, and then the breeze 
freshened in a squall, with a sudden edge of true 
wintry spite and frost in it. Our nets were dragged 
in, and all made snug, and by no means too soon, 



I: 









\V;k J : 







The North Sea. 273 

for, even whilst this was doing, the sky blackened 
with an ugly smear of rusty red, like an old blood- 
stain, low down over the hard green tumble of sea 
in the west. By seven o'clock it was blowing half a 
gale of wind, the evening black as thunder, a high 
sea running, with such breaks of froth bursting and 
blowing from the heads of the dark liquid heaps that 
a wild stormy light as of phosphorus, but not to 
be expressed in words nor to be dealt with by the 
brush, came and went in the sweeping ice-cold wind 
dyeing the heavens as black again for it. Truly 
might I say with Tom Hood that I had often met a 
gale before, but never such a blow. The smack was 
of some thirty tons burden, with a tine spring for- 
ward, and she took the seas with the buoyancy of 
an egg-shell; but it was just this "taking" that 
rendered the tempestuous reel, the midnight North 
Sea hornpipe insufferable to me, who was used to 
nothing under a thousand tons, and who had never 
gone a trawling before. The master of the smack 
invited me below to take some rest in one of the 
dark and airless pigeon-holes in which the worthy 
fellows turned in, " all standing." But if the motion 
was desperate on deck, it was unendurable in the 
small well which formed the smacksmen's sea- 
parlour, and I chose to sit in the companion-way, 
where at all events I was sheltered, and where I was 
able to keep a dull and sickly look-out for anything 
that might happen. 

Never did I feel less a sailor than on that night. 
My thoughts were beaten down by the howling wind 



274 The British Seas. 

and the rocket-like careering of the little fabric into 
some sort of stupid emotion of wonder that men 
could be found willing to pursue this sort of life after 
a single experience of hard weather. Is there 
anything severer in the way of seafaring ? When I 
think of a winter's night and a smack in the heart of 
the North Sea in half a hurricane of wind, I am 
satisfied to believe that the vocation of the jacket 
provides no walk comparable with the smacksman's 
in risks, perils, and general misery. With excellent 
irony doth some marine bard of the pigtail period 
pipe up as follows : — 

" Then push round the can : oh ! you have not a notion 
Of sailors, their grog, and the sweethearts and wives ; 
Ah ! give me, my soul, the tight lads of the ocean, 

Who, though they're so wretched, lead such happy lives." 

In the middle of the night, whilst it was yet 
blowing a storm of wind, the clouds broke, and the 
moon looked down — a dull, wet eye of silver; the 
sheets of froth flashed out to the touch of her beam, 
and as I directed my sight at the wild sea rolling in 
hills under her, a ship shaped herself out of the pale 
gloom and passed us. She was a huge lump of a 
wooden vessel, some remnant of the old Danish or 
Swedish navy, a frigate, with a row of ports, and she 
was looking up to the weather under three bands of 
close-reefed topsails and a reefed forecourse ; heeling 
away from us, and towering over us, too, as she 
plunged foaming by with snowstorms of foam burst- 
ing from her sides, and the noise of the gale in her 
rigging as loud in the ear of the night as the rattle of 




w 



T 2 



The North Sea. 277 

heavy artillery swept along a street. Then the moon 
was eclipsed, the blackness fell again as a curtain, but 
the swiftness of her revelation and her evanishment 
made one think of the vision of that old-world ship of 
war as of something storm-born. Whenever I hear of 
Vanderdecken, my mind goes to the full-rigged appa- 
rition I viewed from the little companion-way of a 
smack during a certain cold and howling midnight 
that I spent in the North Sea. 

But the space at my disposal obliges me to see all 
ready for bringing up ; otherwise it would be 
pleasant to heave-to abreast of Scarborough, whilst 
we gaze at the prettiest, if not the most picturesque, 
town on the east coast, and deplore its distance 
from London. Scarborough would be the most 
popular seaside haunt in England were it within a 
comfortable riding distance of the metropolis. How 
noble is the coast scenery here ! How grand is 
Flamborough Head! But a proper course from this 
point must put that huge round of shore, which, 
starting from Thornham, does not cease its curve 
till Lowestoft is reached, well on the starboard bow. 
Until the cliffs of Norfolk and Suffolk heave into 
view all must be German Ocean. 

There are many who could not conceive of a higher 
degree of felicity than a coasting cruise in a steamer. 
Opportunities for these excursions perhaps are not 
very numerous. A pity : for there is no lack of idle 
steamboats ; the scenery lover is plentiful, and our 
methods of spending our few holidays are not so 
numerous as to prohibit the admission of an original 



278 The British Seas. 

idea now and again. A sailing vessel might not 
provide a satisfactory ark for a tour of this sort ; 
the calm, the tide, the inshore and offshore wind — 
these, and the like of these, are inevitable conditions 
for the interruption of happiness. But steam is at 
the will of pleasure ; it will pause, it will move, it 
will approach and withdraw, it will act without 
consciousness of tidal influence, it cares not in what 
quarter the wind sits, and therefore a steamboat is 
the proper vehicle for a coastal voyage of inspection, 
in which you may halt before beauties to survey 
them, penetrate bays and harbours, explore rivers, 
and so return home with a satisfied spirit and a 
mind enlarged. From the Tyne to the Thames, or 
from the Thames to the Tyne, and back again ! 
This should prove a tempting advertisement, always 
providing that the caterer supplies one with the 
right kind of little ship. These amblings, moreover, 
are invaluable as aids to local patriotism. They 
may not render a man more loyal to the country at 
large, but they invariably deepen his attachment to 
his own district. With what joy does the Cockney 
receive the embrace of his River Thames as he pene- 
trates the noble stream after trips up the H umber, and 
the Tees, and the Tyne ! The creosote works, the acres 
of inky chimneys, the building-yards, the dominions 
of the steam-fiend, where he forges the propeller 
that drives and the anchor that holds ; how light 
will be the magic of the memory these things may 
create in the mind of the Cockney who, yet fresh 
from them, but now steaming up the Thames, 



The North Sea. 279 

surveys the shores of Gravesend and of Tilbury, the 
engaging scenery of the Isle of Dogs, and the 
wonders of the waterside regions of the great city 
looming in massive proportions amidst a brown fog 
more sombre than anything that can be produced by 
the smokestacks of steel and chemical works ! 



THE END 



H M>' 79 



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N. MANCHESTER, 
INDIANA 46962 



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